Minister of the Nation’s Supreme Court (SCJN) Yasmín Esquivel plagiarized the dissertation that earned her her 2009 doctorate in law from Anahuac University, a private school in Mexico. EL PAÍS has confirmed that 209 of the 456 pages of his dissertation Fundamental Rights in the Mexican Legal System and Their Defense correspond to previously published works 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 lawyers. Two of these authors have confirmed the plagiarism to this newspaper. Two Mexican academics, who blindly checked the proofs without knowing that they were the minister’s work, also thought it was plagiarism. Another earlier Esquivel paper, the 1987 bachelor’s thesis, is analyzed by UNAM, which in a first review confirmed that it was an “essential copy” of another student’s thesis submitted a year earlier.
After being strongly consulted by this medium, the minister responded following the publication of the inquiry this Friday and through her lawyer, Alejandro Romano. In a letter, the commissioner points out that the “omission” of citing original authors in a thesis constitutes a “defect” or “oversight” but not plagiarism, especially when it comes to respected authors who are frequently referred to by students is taken … and law professors. “When a university institution validates a research paper and considers that it meets the standards to be accepted and serves as a base document to check the professional skills of the researcher, the possible presence of omissions in the author’s citations or errors in his writing has only that meaning – defects or oversights – but never a form of plagiarism, because technically this legal figure implies the publication of an entire work in someone else’s name,” the letter reads. The supervisor of the minister’s doctoral thesis, José Antonio Núñez Ochoa, declined to comment.
Authors whose work has been taken over by Esquivel without citing it consider it plagiarism. “I recognized it immediately with my chapter, it’s a textual, verbatim rendering of pages and pages. She doesn’t put quotes, so it’s a book plagiarism, what she did is a cut and paste. It is obvious that you copied directly. I saw it right away. It’s not a subtle matter. He did it in a very crude way,” said José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, Minister of Culture and Sports of the Spanish Government from 2020 to 2021 and today Ambassador to UNESCO, EL PAÍS by phone, of the Esquivel, without citing his text ” Rousseau and Human Rights”, published in History of fundamental rights (Dykinson, 1998), a monumental work in seven volumes co-written with other authors who have also been 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 Fundamental Rights in Mexico (UNAM, 2004), for which she spent 15 years preparing and writing three. “It’s plagiarism. If we understand plagiarism to mean publishing a text under your name that you did not write in an original way, it is plagiarism. There is no other way to define it. And there is use of both the main text, which required effort when I wrote it, and the sources I checked to nourish my own text. It seems to me a double plagiarism, due to the use of sources that have not been personally checked and that correspond to an effort made by others, an effort that has cost me time, checked bibliographic collections from other countries, money to buy copies of the Making articles and for someone to come along and take advantage of that, it seems to me that there’s no other way to qualify that,” he explained.
Both Rodríguez Uribes and Carbonell were unaware that the thesis came from Esquivel as they reviewed 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 they gave their assessments. Subtracting the title, index, acknowledgments and bibliography, plagiarism corresponds to 46.5% of the pages written in the dissertation.
An academic and researcher at UNAM, who has supervised 44 doctoral and master’s theses and who prefers not to be cited at the moment, claims that by the time Esquivel presented his doctoral thesis in 2008, there was already an awareness in the academy of the severity of the academic plagiarism. “A doctoral thesis cannot have these flaws: they cannot belong to another authorship for almost 50% of the total. I would consider that plagiarism. That’s too many citation problems. Too many elements that, with lack of technique and maliciousness, make you want to take on another job,” he says.
Another law academic who has advised 30 dissertations and also requested their deletion confirms that after reviewing the dissertation, he identified “patterns of plagiarism”. “Entire and continuous paragraphs by the various authors are taken as their own, with no attribution, no quotation marks, and even the footnotes are the annotations of the original text. And even the format of the footnotes changes depending on the book. [que se utilice]. When the author makes analyses, they are not only revisited, they are literally the original author’s analyses,” he says. “It cannot be considered a citation error because it is a pattern to use ideas and entire paragraphs from other books. I would consider it a plagiarism text, it is not a self-written text, it should not be analyzable.”
These two scientists asked not to give their names for fear of reprisals after learning that the doctoral thesis they were blindly analyzing had been supported by the minister. One of them asked not to name the university to which he belongs either.
Esquivel was a judge at the Agrarian Supreme Court when she submitted her doctorate in 2008. Between December of the same year and January 2009, she received the vote of approval from seven synods — all Anahuac University academics — who, according to the arguments of their vote, state that they recognized the originality of the work and its contributions to the legal field. Neither the synod nor the doctoral supervisor José Antonio Núñez Ochoa noticed or did not notice the plagiarism. Esquivel received her postgraduate degree in June 2009 and in December she received her professional doctorate from the Department of Public Education (SEP).
On the left Yasmín Esquivel’s dissertation and on the right her degree awarded by Anahuac University.
The plagiarized authors
Through the Turnitin text matching processor and a direct comparison in bibliographic archives, this newspaper was able to determine that the judge extracted excerpts from the work “Rights and Guarantees: The Rights of the Weakest” (Trotta, 1999) by Luigi Ferrajoli, a prolific 82-year-old -year-old Italian lawyer who has written a dozen books; also from Fundamental Rights: Notes on the History of Constitutions (Trotta, 1996), by Maurizio Fiarovanti (1952-2022), an Italian researcher and academic; the same applies to the book Los derechos del hombre (Reus, 1969) by the Spanish jurist José Castán Tobeñas (1889-1969), who was President of the Supreme Court of his country; and the essays “The concept of human rights” (IIDH, 1994) by Venezuelan academic Pedro Nikken (1945-2019), former President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and “Legal nature of fundamental rights” by German jurist Rainer Arnold in the book “Rights in Europe” published in 1997 by the National Open University of Spain.
Other authors whose works were copied are the Spanish jurists Gregorio Peces-Barba Martínez (1938-2012) – former President of the Congress and considered one of the fathers of the post-Francoist Constitution –, Eusebio Fernández García (1952) and Antonio Enrique Pérez Luño (1944), with whom Rodríguez Uribes (1968) published the Historia de los derechos fundamentales. The former Spanish Minister of Culture has confirmed that Esquivel also plagiarized the chapter published in this book by his colleague Pérez Luño entitled “The Role of Kant in the Historical Genesis of Human Rights”.
He also copied from Pérez Luño Esquivel the essay “The Foundations of Human Rights”, published in 1983 in the Revista de Estudios Políticos (Nueva Época), edited since 1941 by the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies of the Spanish government. “If a person reproduces verbatim content previously published by other people over many pages and does not cite it by attributing it verbatim, he is plagiarizing because he is not citing those original authors,” says Rodríguez Uribes.
On the left Esquivel’s dissertation, on the right the essay “The Foundations of Human Rights” by Antonio Enrique Pérez Luño. The country
In addition, Esquivel extracted chapters from works by other Mexican authors, such as Constitution of Querétaro, bachelor thesis presented at UNAM in 1968 by Jorge Carpizo MacGregor (1944-2012), renowned jurist and politician, the rector of the same university, Attorney General of Mexico , President of the National Human Rights Commission and Secretary of the Governorate .
Some chapters and subchapters of Esquivel’s dissertation have the same name chosen by the original authors. The copy contained the footnotes referred to by the authors in their works. In some cases, these quotations have been adopted by the minister and included in the bibliography section of her dissertation as if she had consulted them first hand. For example, a book by Kant is published in German and a book by Bobbio in Italian, because Pérez Luño consulted them in his chapter published in the Historia de los derechos fundamentales.
The transcription of the quotations below is so faithful to the original that in one of them the minister wrote: “We treat the concept of ‘ruled’ in our work Las guaranties individual, Chapter Two”, a note by Burgoa Orihuela in the Amparo essay. Elsewhere it contained the annotation ‘N. des T.” (Translator’s note) from Fioravanti’s book. On another page he transcribed: “See our article ‘Subjective Rights’ in the New Legal Encyclopedia, Barcelona, Seix, t. VII”, a comment that Castán Tobeñas actually made in relation to a work published between 1950 and 1965 (Esquivel was born in 1963).
In her dissertation, the minister reproduced literally 37 pages of the individual guarantees of the respected constitutional lawyer Ignacio Burgoa. From this book, whose updated version of 2001 is that of Esquivel, he copies four paragraphs – without a single citation of the author – for his chapter “Individual Guarantees and Fundamental Rights in the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States”. A few pages later, in the same section of the thesis, Esquivel actually names Burgoa, opens quotation marks, and indicates that he used pages 191 and 192 of the same book. Actually he had changed completely from the 155 to the 195.
On the left Esquivel’s dissertation, 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”. It begins with a quote from Luigi Ferrajoli, closes the quotation marks at the end of the paragraph, and continues with the same text that the Italian author published years earlier. Although from time to time he incorporates ideas from other jurists – breaking the exact original scheme – he plagiarizes Italian for 33 pages in one of the longest copies of the dissertation. Ferrajoli, reviewing the work in Spanish, considers that it was not a matter of plagiarism, “but of quoting and discussing one of my ideas”. The Italian author does not mention that Esquivel transcribes the footnotes and quotations that he himself typeset, nor the several pages that she copies without citing his book.
Carbonell’s book was included by Esquivel in the general part of the bibliography of her dissertation, but never at the end of the 14 pages where the minister transcribed the Mexican lawyer’s text. In an interview with that newspaper, Carbonell points out that in writing Fundamental Rights in Mexico – which he describes as his “pinnacle work” – he used some books and journals 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 Human Rights Yearbook and published in Madrid in 1986, appears on the pages copied by Esquivel and also in his bibliography. “This magazine is impossible to get. If you tell me, ‘Get it here and now’, it’s not achieved. I received the text in Spain. I photocopied it. He is a Spanish author that I brought to a Mexican publication. Either my book references it, or I find it difficult that anyone had access to that author,” summarizes Carbonell. The Mexican jurist even points out how Esquivel transcribed this note of his on one of the pages copied from his work: “Another question of conceptual order has to do with the very name ‘fundamental rights’ chosen for the title of this book ’, although she was not presenting a book but a dissertation.
The “bad faith”
However, in other chapters there is not a single citation from the copied works. This is the case with the essay “Rechtsnatur der Grundrechte”, which the minister took from the German lawyer Rainer Arnold. There, according to an external review by a scholar associated with the publication, who prefers not to be cited, they are “repeated to the comma”: “They are obviously the same. It presents a work based on cut and paste,” he explained.
Neither at the end nor in the bibliography is there a trace of the 22 almost verbatim pages of Fundamental Rights: Notes on the History of Fiovarantis Constitutions, nor of the five of José Castán Tobeñas’ Rights of Man, nor of the 10 of the text by Rodriguez Uribes. This author, who is also a member of the leadership of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), points out that without citing him, Esquivel even copied the term “Russian”, which he chose instead of the usual “Rousseauian” as an exercise the originality of the author. Although it is a “detail”, for the Spanish jurist it demonstrates the size of the copy. “I hesitated about my PhD, but in the end I decided to use this word: I say ‘Rusonian’. And I do it by following a professor who has already done it, José Rubio Carracedo, thinking of simplifying the language. I was never sure if I was doing the right thing by choosing that word or not, but she uses it without quoting me,” he points out.
On the left Esquivel’s dissertation, on the right the thesis of former UNAM rector Jorge Carpizo MacGregor. The country
The UNAM academic consulted confirms that there are elements in Esquivel’s dissertation that “maliciously prove” such as: B. Copying another author’s footnotes in 18 subchapters or not citing the books used in the general bibliography: “As happens with the dissertation The Constitution of Querétaro by Jorge Carpizo. There was such bad intention here that he didn’t even put it on.” The other researcher points out that in Esquivel’s work he notes some loose paragraphs that are original but act as connectors to unite the plagiarized parts. ” A doctoral thesis is an investigation: it must have a problem, make hypotheses, a methodology of analysis and then develop.The text [de Esquivel] It looks like a monographic work that brings together, 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 formed the jury for Yasmín Esquivel. David Jiménez González, former senator, former magistrate and current ambassador to Honduras, observed: “This great work contemplates a meticulous, thorough and responsible study, which gives it a unique value of an intellectual nature, which, incidentally, has always been demonstrated by the teacher Esquivel Mossa” .
Professor Sara Pérez Kasparian considered that “the work is of the required quality, new and innovative and will be useful as a bibliographic heritage”. Víctor Manzanilla Schaffer, former PRI governor of the Yucatán, defined it as “a reference work” and Luis Humberto Delgadillo Gutiérrez, former judge at the Federal Administrative Court, defined it as “an in-depth analysis of fundamental rights”. In addition, the court consisted of Eduardo Enrique Gómez García, a military man in charge of managing federal prisons, and professors Carlos Cabrera Beck and Héctor Moreno Núñez.
On December 21, 2022, after initial allegations of plagiarism in her bachelor thesis at UNAM, the minister went to her doctoral supervisor José Antonio Núñez Ochoa to defend herself. He signed a letter to her – which she posted on her Twitter account – in which the professor highlighted that her postgraduate thesis was “outstanding in research, the integration of each of its chapters, the bibliographical references and the rigorous academic rigor required of”. of Anahuac University.
I share the testimony of my PhD supervisor, Dr. José Antonio Núñez Ochoa, Coordinator of the Legal Research Institute of the Law Faculty of the Universidad Anáhuac México, and the signed transcript of my doctoral examination. pic.twitter.com/Ge07yEsTqN
— Yasmin Esquivel Mossa (@YasminEsquivel_) December 22, 2022
In the only statements made by the minister after the first scandal erupted, she assured that she would not resign. “I have an impeccable career, I have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. Obtaining a doctorate underpinned Esquivel’s legal career. In 2009, after receiving the title and her professional certificate issued by the SEP – an official document that qualifies her as a professional – she managed to enter the Administrative Court of Mexico City, where she began a long career, first as a Superior Chamber Judge and then as President, a position she held from 2012 to 2019 when she was proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for a 15-year tenure as Minister of the Supreme Court. Esquivel may have until 2034 before the Mexican Supreme Court.
You can consult the index here with the full comparisons of all the chapters reviewed.
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