Rights
1853 Constitution with constitutionalised human-rights treaties
Argentina is a federal republic under the 1853 Constitution, extensively reformed in 1994. Article 75(22) grants a list of international human-rights treaties the same rank as the Constitution itself, so the American Convention and the ICCPR are directly enforceable domestic law rather than mere international obligations. Rights are protected by the amparo action, habeas corpus and habeas data, all of which the 1994 reform wrote expressly into Article 43.
Key rules
- Jurisdiction — Federal, with each province retaining its own constitution and courts
- Deadline — Amparo: no fixed statutory limit, but must be brought promptly and within 15 days of a challenged act under Ley 16.986
- Deadline — Habeas corpus: available at any time, decided urgently
Governing law
- Constitución de la Nación Argentina (1853, as reformed 1994) (arts. 43 and 75(22))
- Ley 16.986amparo procedure
- Ley 23.098habeas corpus
In practice
The constitutionalised-treaty rule in Article 75(22) is the distinctive feature of Argentine constitutional law. Because those instruments sit at constitutional rank, the Supreme Court applies Inter-American Court case law when interpreting domestic rights, and litigants routinely plead the American Convention directly. Habeas data, also in Article 43, gives any person the right to learn what data public or private registries hold about them and to demand correction or deletion.