Mexican Center for Environmental Law v. Ministry of Energy (on clean energy targets)

The Mexican Center for Environmental Law (CEMDA) filed an amparo lawsuit in September 2025 for the Ministry of Energy’s failure to comply with the legal target set out in the General Law on Climate Change which established an obligation to produce, by 2024, at least 35% of its electricity generation from clean energy sources. On February 2026, the District Court dismissed the Ministry of Energy’s arguments and decided in favor of CEMDA, based on the following arguments: i) It determined that CEMDA does have standing to file the lawsuit because its purpose is the protection of the environment and that the Ministry’s omission affects collective environmental services such as good air quality and climate regulation, which benefit all people. ii) The Court clarified that the law not only obliges the Ministry to “attempt” to meet the targets by implementing public policies to that end, but also imposes an obligation to achieve a result, which is to reach 35% by 2024; and iii) The evidence of the Ministry’s non-compliance was made explicit, since in its own reports, the agency states that in 2023 the share of clean energy fell to 26.5%, thus moving away from the legal target. As a result, the District Court ordered the Ministry of Energy to: Inform the Court within 90 business days of all public policies, incentives, programs, or projects aimed at meeting the goal; present a timetable with intermediate targets for achieving the 35 percentage.; apply the principle of non-regression, which means that targets lower than those already achieved cannot be proposed.