In 2009, Minister Yasmín Esquivel plagiarized 209 pages out of 456 that she presented in her thesis to obtain her doctorate degree in law from the Universidad Anáhuac.
According to EL PAÍS, through an investigation it has been verified that a large part of her thesis “Fundamental Rights in the Mexican legal system and their defense” corresponds 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 these authors have confirmed the plagiarism to this newspaper. Two Mexican academics, who reviewed the evidence blindly, without knowing that it corresponded to a work of the minister, have also considered it to be plagiarism.
EL PAÍS has verified that 209 of the 456 pages of her thesis Los derechos fundamentales en el sistema jurídico mexicano y su defensa 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 these authors have confirmed the plagiarism to this newspaper. Two Mexican academics, who reviewed the evidence blindly, without knowing that it corresponded to a work by the minister, have also considered it to be plagiarism. Another of Esquivel’s previous theses, her 1987 bachelor’s degree thesis, is being analyzed by UNAM, which in a first opinion accredited that it was a “substantial copy” of another student’s degree work presented a year earlier.
After being consulted insistently by this media, the minister responded after the publication of the investigation, this Friday and through her lawyer, Alejandro Romano. In a letter, the representative has pointed out that the “omission” of citations to original authors in a degree work is a “deficiency” or “oversight“, but not plagiarism, especially when it is about recognized authors who are commonly referred to by students and law professors. “If a university institution validated a research work, and considered that it met the standards to be accepted, and serve as a base document to examine the professional capabilities of the researcher, the possible existence of omissions in the citations of authors, or errors in their writing, only have that meaning – that of deficiencies or oversights – but never a form of plagiarism, because technically this legal figure implies the publication of a complete work in the name of another,” the letter states. The director of the minister’s doctoral thesis, José Antonio Núñez Ochoa, has declined to comment.
Authors whose work was taken by Esquivel without citation do consider it plagiarism. “In the case of my chapter, I recognized it immediately, it is a textual, literal reproduction of pages and pages. She does not put quotation marks, therefore it is a plagiarism of the book, what she has done is a cut and paste. It is evident that what she has done is to copy directly. I saw it right away. It is not a subtle matter. She has done it in a very crude way,” José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, Minister of Culture and Sport of the Spanish Government from 2020 to 2021 and now ambassador to UNESCO, from whom Esquivel took, without citing, his text “Rousseau y los derechos humanos“, published in Historia de los derechos fundamentales (Dykinson, 1998), a monumental seven-volume work written in conjunction with other authors who were also plagiarized, told EL PAÍS by telephone.
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