The legal representative of Minister Yasmin Esquivel, Alejandro Romano, has sent a reply this Friday to the exclusive EL PAIS where it is pointed out that almost half of the judge’s doctoral thesis corresponds to pages and texts by other authors. Given this information, the lawyer maintains: “The possible existence of omissions in the author’s citations, or errors in their wording, only have that meaning, -that of deficiencies or oversights-, but never a form of plagiarism, because technically it is legal figure implies the publication of a complete work in the name of another”. In this sense, Romano insists that it is “totally inaccurate that, by omitting to cite an author in a professional thesis, this automatically implies plagiarism of his complete work.”
This newspaper has verified that 209 of the 456 pages of the thesis correspond to unquoted texts by 12 other authors, including a former rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); a former Spanish Minister of Culture and a former president of the Supreme Court of Spain; a former president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), as well as Mexican, Italian, Spanish and German jurists. Two of these authors, the former minister Jose Manuel Rodriguez Uribes and the Mexican academic Miguel Carbonell reviewed Esquivel’s thesis and recognized the plagiarism of their texts.
“In the case of my chapter, it is a verbatim, literal reproduction of pages and pages. She does not put quotation marks, therefore it is a book plagiarism, what she has done is a cut and paste. It is evident that what she has done is copied directly. I have seen it right away. It is not a subtle matter. She has done it in a very crude way, ”Jose Manuel Rodriguez Uribes told EL PAIS by phone. For his part, Carbonell pointed out: “It is plagiarism. If we understand by plagiarism to publish with your name a text that you did not write in an original way, it is plagiarism. There is no other way to define it.”
In the response sent, Romano emphasizes that “the preparation of the thesis to obtain an academic degree is not an end in itself, nor does it have commercial purposes, but rather only constitutes a mechanism for a group of specialists in the field to , verify that a person has the professional qualities to perform in a science or art, or simply to climb one more grade than they already have”. Thus, the lawyer recalls the “university institution validated a research paper, and considered that it met the standards to be accepted.”
with the thesis Fundamental rights in the Mexican legal system and their defense, In 2009, Esquivel obtained her PhD in Law from the Anahuac University. The seven synod members that made up her jury—all of them academics from this university—all of them academics from the Anahuac University—described in her voting arguments the originality of the work and its contributions to the field of Law.
With this job, Esquivel, who was then a magistrate of the Agrarian Court, received her doctor’s certificate and underpinned her judicial career. She managed to enter the Court of Administrative Justice of Mexico City, where she began a long career, first as a Superior Chamber magistrate and then as president, a position she held from 2012 to 2019, when she was proposed by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as Minister of the Supreme Court of Justice for a period of 15 years.
Romano defends that “the honor, competence and probity of a person are values that are endorsed every day, not only when preparing an academic work”. These three qualities are listed as required to hold the position of minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Yasmin Esquivel is also currently facing an investigation by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) after the university accredited in a first opinion that her law degree thesis is a “substantial copy” of one published a year ago. before by another student.
