Minister Yasmín Esquivel plagiarized in her doctoral thesis

The Minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) Yasmín Esquivel plagiarized the thesis with which she obtained in 2009 the degree of Doctor of Law from the Anahuac University, a private school in Mexico.

EL PAÍS has verified that 209 of the 456 pages of her thesis

they correspond to works previously published 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 those authors have confirmed the plagiarism to this newspaper.

Two Mexican academics, who reviewed the proofs blindly, without knowing that they corresponded to a work by the minister, have also considered that it is plagiarism.

Another previous Esquivel thesis, the undergraduate thesis from 1987, is being analyzed by the UNAM, which in a first opinion confirmed that it was a "substantial copy" of the degree work of another student presented a year earlier.

After being consulted insistently by this medium, the minister did not respond to questions from this newspaper before the publication of this report.

The director of the work, José Antonio Núñez, has declined to comment.

“In the case of my chapter, I have recognized it immediately, it is a textual, 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.

He has done it in a very crude way," José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, Minister of Culture and Sports of the Government of Spain from 2020 to 2021 and today ambassador to UNESCO, told EL PAÍS by phone, from whom Esquivel took, without citing, his text "Rousseau and human rights", published in

(Dykinson, 1998), a monumental work of seven volumes written together with other authors who were also plagiarized.

On the left, the thesis of the minister Yasmín Esquivel, on the right, a page from the chapter 'Rule of law, democracy and rights' by the Spanish ex-minister José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes.

The country

Mexican jurist and researcher Miguel Carbonell has confirmed that Minister Esquivel also copied several pages from her book

(UNAM, 2004), for which he prepared 15 years and to which he dedicated three.

“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.

And there is a use both of the main text, which involved an effort that I made when writing it, and of the sources that I reviewed to nourish my own text.

It seems to me double plagiarism, due to the use of sources that were not reviewed personally and that correspond to an effort from others, an effort that involved me time, reviewing bibliographical collections from other countries, money to make copies of the articles, and that someone arrives and takes advantage of this, it seems to me that there is no other way to qualify it ”, he stated.

Both Rodríguez Uribes and Carbonell were unaware that the thesis was Esquivel's when reviewing the sections where his texts were transcribed, so that their opinions would be impartial.

It was revealed to them that the minister was the author after issuing her assessment.

Discounting the title, index, acknowledgments and bibliography, plagiarism is equivalent to 46.5% of the pages written in the thesis.

An academic and researcher at UNAM who has directed 44 doctoral and master's theses, and who for the moment prefers not to be quoted, maintains that by the time Esquivel presented his doctoral thesis, in 2008, in the academy there was already an awareness of the severity of academic plagiarism.

“A doctoral thesis cannot have these flaws: you cannot have almost 50% of the entirety belonging to another authorship.

I would think this is plagiarism.

That's too many citation issues.

Too many elements that allow you to look at the lack of technique and bad faith, that you want to appropriate other work ”, he considers.

Another academic specialized in Law and who has advised 30 theses, who has also asked to be omitted, affirms that after reviewing the thesis, he identified "patterns" of plagiarism.

“Complete and consecutive paragraphs of the different authors are taken as their own, without reference, without quotation marks, and even the footnotes are the notes of the original text.

And even the format of the footnotes changes according to the book [used].

When the author makes analyses, they are not only taken up again: they are verbatim the original author's analyses”, he describes.

“It cannot be considered a citation error because it is a pattern of using ideas and entire paragraphs from other books.

I would consider it a plagiarism text, it is not a self-authored text, it should not be able to be evaluated”.

These two academics asked to omit their names for fear of reprisals after learning that the doctoral thesis they blindly analyzed had been supported by the minister.

One of them asked that the university to which he is attached not be identified either.

Esquivel was a magistrate in the Superior Agrarian Court at the time she delivered her doctoral thesis, in 2008. Between December of that year and January 2009, she obtained the approval vote of seven synods —all of them academics from the Anahuac University— who, according to It is observed in the arguments of their vote, they recognized the originality of the work and its contributions to the field of Law.

Neither the synod nor the doctoral thesis adviser, José Antonio Núñez Ochoa, noticed the plagiarism or did not notice it.

Esquivel received her postgraduate degree in June 2009, and in December the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) issued her professional doctor's certificate.

On the left, Yasmín Esquivel's thesis, and on the right, her title issued by the Anahuac University.

The plagiarized authors

Through the Turnitin text match processor and a direct comparison in bibliographical archives, this newspaper has managed to establish that the judge took extracts from the work Rights

(Trotta, 1999), by Luigi Ferrajoli, a prolific 82-year-old Italian jurist who has written a dozen books;

also from

(Trotta, 1996), by Maurizio Fiarovanti (1952-2022), an Italian researcher and academic;

the same from the book

(Reus, 1969), by the Spanish jurist José Castán Tobeñas (1889-1969), who was president of the Supreme Court of his country;

as well as the essays "The concept of human rights" (IIDH, 1994) by the Venezuelan academic Pedro Nikken (1945-2019), former president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and "Legal nature of fundamental rights" by the German jurist Rainer Arnold, included in the book

, published by the National Distance Education University of Spain in 1997.

Other authors whose work was copied are the Spanish jurists Gregorio Peces-Barba Martínez (1938-2012) —former president of Congress and considered one of the fathers of the Constitution after Francoism—, Eusebio Fernández García (1952) and Antonio Enrique Pérez Luño ( 1944), with whom Rodríguez Uribes (1968) published

.

The former Minister of Culture of Spain has verified that Esquivel also plagiarized the chapter published in that book by his colleague Pérez Luño, entitled "The role of Kant in the historical formation of human rights."

From Pérez Luño Esquivel he also copied the essay "The foundations of human rights", published in 1983 in the Revista de Estudios Políticos (Nueva Época), which has been published since 1941 by the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies of the Government of Spain.

“When a person, over many pages, reproduces content previously published by other people verbatim and does not quote them, attributing them verbatim, since he does not cite those original authors, he is plagiarizing,” says Rodríguez Uribes.

On the left, Esquivel's thesis, on the right, the essay 'The foundations of human rights' by Antonio Enrique Pérez Luño.

The country

In addition, Esquivel extracted chapters from works written by other Mexican authors, such as

(Porrúa, 1944) and

(Porrúa, 1943), by constitutional lawyer Ignacio Burgoa Orihuela (1918-2005), and from

, Bachelor's thesis presented at UNAM in 1968 by Jorge Carpizo MacGregor (1944-2012), a renowned jurist and politician who was rector of the same university, attorney general of Mexico, president of the National Human Rights Commission, and secretary of Governorate.

Some chapters and subchapters of Esquivel's thesis have the same name chosen by the original authors.

The copy included the footnotes that the authors referred to in their works.

In some cases these quotes were taken by the minister and taken to the Bibliography section of her thesis as if she herself had consulted them first hand.

For example, a book by Kant appears in German and a book by Bobbio is in Italian, because that is how Pérez Luño consulted them in his chapter published in

.

The transcription of the quotes at the bottom is so faithful that in one of them the minister wrote: "We deal with the concept of 'governed' in our work

, chapter two", a note made by Burgoa Orihuela in

.

Elsewhere she included the annotation “N.

of the T.”

(translator's note) from Fioravanti's book.

On another page she transcribed: “See our article 'Subjective Rights' in the New Legal Encyclopedia, Barcelona, ​​Seix, t.

VII”, an annotation that Castán Tobeñas actually made in reference to a work published between 1950 and 1965 (Esquivel was born in 1963).

The minister reproduced in her thesis literally 37 pages of

by the prestigious constitutionalist Ignacio Burgoa.

From this book, whose updated version of 2001 is the one taken by Esquivel, she copies four sections —without a single citation to the author— for her chapter “Individual guarantees and fundamental rights in the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States”.

A few pages later, in that same section of the thesis, Esquivel does name Burgoa, opens quotation marks and points out that he has used pages 191 and 192 of that same book.

Actually, he had completely moved from 155 to 195.

On the left, Esquivel's thesis, on the right a page from the book 'Individual guarantees' by Ignacio Burgoa.El País

The judge did something similar in her section on the “Formal concept of fundamental rights”.

She begins by quoting Luigi Ferrajoli, closes the quotation marks at the end of the paragraph and continues with the same text that the Italian author published years before.

Although from time to time she incorporates notions from other jurists —which breaks the exact original scheme—, she plagiarizes the Italian for 33 pages, in one of the longest copies of the thesis.

Ferrajoli, who reviewed the work in Spanish, considers that there was no plagiarism, "but rather the citation and discussion of one of my ideas."

The Italian author does not mention that Esquivel transcribes the footnotes and quotes that he himself put, nor the several pages that she copies without citing her book.

Carbonell's book was included by Esquivel in the general section of the Bibliography of her thesis, although never at the bottom of the 14 pages in which the minister transcribed the text of the Mexican lawyer.

Interviewed by this newspaper, Carbonell refers that to write

—which he qualifies as his “top” work— he used some books and magazines that were only available in Spanish archives, where he wrote.

One of these works, the essay “A classification of human rights”, by Manuel Atienza, compiled in the

and published in Madrid in 1986, appears in the pages copied by Esquivel and also in his bibliography.

“That magazine is impossible to get.

If you tell me: 'get it here and now', it is not achieved.

I got the text in Spain.

I have it photocopied.

He is a Spanish author that I brought to a Mexican publication.

Either my book is referring to or I find it difficult for someone to have had access to this author”, summarizes Carbonell.

The Mexican jurist even points out how, in one of the pages copied from his work, Esquivel transcribed this note of his: “Another question of a conceptual order has to do with the name of 'fundamental rights' that has been chosen to

”, when what she was presenting was not a book but a thesis.

The "bad faith"

In other chapters, however, there is not a single quote from the copied works.

This is the case of the essay "Legal nature of fundamental rights" that the minister takes from the German jurist Rainer Arnold.

There, according to an external review by an academic related to the publication that she prefers not to be cited, "they are repeated up to the commas": "They are obviously the same.

It is presenting a work based on cutting and pasting ”, she has affirmed.

There is also no trace, either at the bottom or in the bibliography, of the 22 pages reproduced almost verbatim from the work of

Fiovaranti's Constitutions, nor of the five of

by José Castán Tobeñas, nor of the 10 of the text by Rodríguez Uribes.

This author, who is also a member of the leadership of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), points out that Esquivel even copied, without citing him, the term "Russonian", which he chose instead of the usual "Rousseauian" in an exercise of authorial originality. .

Although it is a "detail", for the Spanish jurist it demonstrates the magnitude of the copy.

“I hesitated in my doctoral thesis, but in the end I opted for that word: I say 'Rusonian'.

And I do it by following a professor, José Rubio Carracedo, who had already done it, and thinking of simplifying the language.

I have never been clear about whether I did the right thing by choosing that word or not, but she uses it without quoting me, ”he points out.

On the left, Esquivel's thesis, on the right, the undergraduate thesis of former UNAM rector Jorge Carpizo MacGregor.

The country

The UNAM academic consulted affirms that in Esquivel's thesis there are elements "proving bad faith", such as having copied the footnotes from another author in 18 subchapters or not having cited the books even used in the general bibliography: "As happens with the thesis

by Jorge Carpizo.

Here there was such a bad intention that he did not even put it ”.

The other researcher points out that in Esquivel's work he notices some loose paragraphs that are original, but that function as connectors to unite the plagiarized parts.

“A doctoral thesis is an investigation: it must have a problem, establish hypotheses, an analysis methodology and then a development.

[Esquivel's] text looks like a monographic work that he compiles, there is no narrative structure, there is no research question to be answered, ”he says.

These failures were not appreciated by the synod members who made up the jury for Yasmín Esquivel.

David Jiménez González, former senator, former magistrate and today ambassador to Honduras noted: "This magnificent work considers a meticulous, deep and responsible investigation that gives it a singular value of an intellectual nature, which, by the way, has always been demonstrated by the teacher Esquivel Mossa" .

Professor Sara Pérez Kasparian considered that "the work enjoys the required quality, is new, innovative and will be useful as a bibliographic heritage."

Víctor Manzanilla Schaffer, former PRI governor of Yucatán, defined it as "a reference book" and Luis Humberto Delgadillo Gutiérrez, former magistrate of the Federal Court of Administrative Justice, as "an in-depth analysis of fundamental rights."

In addition, the court was made up of Eduardo Enrique Gómez García, a military man who was in charge of the body that administers federal prisons, and professors Carlos Cabrera Beck and Héctor Moreno Núñez.

On December 21, 2022, after the first allegations of plagiarism in her undergraduate thesis at UNAM, the minister went to her doctoral thesis advisor, José Antonio Núñez Ochoa, in her defense.

He signed a letter to her - which she made public on her Twitter account - in which the professor highlighted that her postgraduate degree work was "outstanding in research, integration of each of its chapters, bibliographic references and complied with the strict academic rigor" required by the Anahuac University.

I share the testimony of my doctoral thesis director, Dr. José Antonio Núñez Ochoa, Coordinator of the Institute of Legal Research of the Faculty of Law of the Universidad Anáhuac México and the signed record of my doctoral examination.

pic.twitter.com/Ge07yEsTqN

— Yasmin Esquivel Mossa (@YasminEsquivel_) December 22, 2022

In the only statements that the minister has made after the outbreak of the first scandal, she assured that she was not going to resign.

"I have an impeccable career, I have nothing to be ashamed of," she said.

Obtaining a doctorate degree underpinned Esquivel's judicial career.

After receiving the title and her professional certificate issued by the SEP in 2009 —official document that qualifies her as a professional—, 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 Andrés Manuel López Obrador as minister of the Supreme Court of Justice for a period of 15 years.

Esquivel may be in the Mexican Supreme Court until 2034.

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