Víctor Fuentes / Reform Agency
Friday, April 21, 2023 | 15:23
Mexico City.- A federal court today dismissed the protection of Minister Yasmín Esquivel Mossa to stop the resolution of the UNAM on the alleged plagiarism of her degree thesis in 1987.
The Twenty-First Administrative Collegiate Court ruled, by two votes to one, that Esquivel’s claim is notoriously inadmissible and should not have been admitted for processing last February by federal judge Sandra de Jesús Zúñiga, who also granted a suspension that has prevented UNAM from resolving the case.
The court declared a UNAM complaint appeal founded.
Once the sentence voted today is officially notified to the court, the University Ethics Committee (Cuetica) will be able to continue with the procedure and make it known if Esquivel plagiarized the thesis that the student Édgar Ulises Báez presented in 1986.
Judge Carlos Alberto Zerpa Durán explained, in the public session of the court, that the protection of the Minister is premature, because the mere relief of the procedure of the University Ethics Committee (Cuetica) of the UNAM is not an act of impossible repair.
He added that the final determination of Cuetica is the one that, if adverse to Esquivel, could be the subject of an amparo trial to verify its legality.
Zerpa recalled that Esquivel alleges that the UNAM procedure affects his right to honor.
“In the procedure to which they are citing her, her honor is not being elucidated, but is elucidating the legality or illegality in the preparation of a degree thesis,” he explained.
Fernando Ibarra, the dissident magistrate, criticized the lack of clarity of the procedures that the UNAM has carried out in this case, and considered that the amparo is not notoriously inadmissible and its admission was correct.
Ibarra focused his criticism on the statement issued by the Faculty of Higher Studies (FES) of Aragon, which stated that Esquivel’s thesis was a copy of Báez’s, without having given the minister the right to a prior hearing to defend herself.
The FES issued this statement before turning the file over to Cuetica, and the magistrate maintained that at least for this issue, the amparo should be litigated.
“The only thing the (FES) did was make a comparison of the two documents and reach a conclusion that derives from logic, one was earlier and the other was later,” replied Judge Guillermina Coutiño.
“The complainant from that has the opportunity to undermine that logic, that is, the extraordinary, that is, that the thesis that she presented for examination in 1987 is the original, or that it has no connection. However, that will be reason for a final resolution, and it will be until then that damage is caused that can be challenged through the amparo trial,” he added.
It is worth mentioning that it was just this month, as a result of the Esquivel case, when the UNAM reformed its internal rules to be able to annul titles, exams and degrees, even of graduates, who incur in plagiarism or other dishonest conduct. These rules cannot be applied retroactively to the minister.
The alleged plagiarism of the thesis was revealed by the writer Guillermo Sheridan on December 21.
On February 24, the newspaper El País revealed that 209 of the 456 pages of Esquivel’s doctoral thesis, presented in 2009, are faithful copies of texts by a dozen authors to whom he did not give credit, but the Anahuac University responded that its regulations only allow ex-students to be penalized in the three years following the presentation of the exam.
