Argentine court voids citizenship decree in a naturalisation case

Argentina’s route to citizenship through a “relevant investment” rests on Decree 366/2025, a decree of necessity and urgency. On 30 June 2026 the National Electoral Chamber declared that decree void in an individual naturalisation case. Searches of official sources through 25 September 2026 found no published definition of the qualifying investment and no date for applications.

What the decree set up

Decree 366/2025, published on 29 May 2025, added a ground to Citizenship Law No. 346: a foreign national who shows the National Directorate of Migration that they have made a relevant investment in the country, whatever the length of their residence, may obtain citizenship. Article 2 bis assigns the Economy Ministry the task of defining which investments count as relevant and allows it to designate specific investment projects.

The decree created the Investment Citizenship Programmes Agency, a decentralised body under the Economy Ministry, to design, manage and control investment citizenship programmes, and moved the grant of citizenship from the courts to the migration directorate.

Decree 524/2025, published on 31 July 2025, set the procedure. After the agency’s assessment of the investment and reports on national security and national interests, the migration directorate has 30 business days from receipt of the agency’s report to grant citizenship or reject the request by a reasoned act. That is a deadline for the final step, not for an application as a whole.

What the court decided

The case, recorded as CNE 8843/2023/CA1 under the anonymised title “Y, L”, is an application for a citizenship letter by a Chinese national on the ordinary residence route, begun before the decree took effect. A federal judge with electoral jurisdiction in Entre Ríos rejected it, and the applicant appealed.

The National Electoral Chamber declared Decree 366/2025 void, citing the second paragraph of Article 99(3) of the Constitution, which bars the executive, on pain of absolute and incurable nullity, from issuing provisions of a legislative nature.

The chamber held that the decree’s transfer of citizenship decisions from judges to the migration authority touched electoral matters, which that article excludes from such decrees, and that the reasons the government gave expressed convenience rather than the exceptional urgency required to legislate by decree.

The chamber also found that the applicant had met the requirement of 2 years’ prior residence, reversed the first-instance judgment, ordered that the Ministry of National Security be informed so that it instructs the migration directorate on the ruling, and ordered that federal judges with electoral jurisdiction across the country be notified.

The ruling bears the digital signatures of judges Alberto Ricardo Dalla Vía and Daniel Bejas, dated 30 June 2026.

The digitally signed judgment reviewed for this article is held in the repository of Argentina’s Ministerio Público de la Defensa; the court’s own website could not be reached during the research. The ruling was issued in a single case. The government’s official legal database lists no norm repealing the decree, and whether an appeal against the ruling has been filed or decided could not be verified.

A health provision implemented after the ruling

On 11 August 2026 the Health Ministry published Resolution 1066/2026 in the Official Gazette to implement Article 3 of the same decree, which changed the rules on healthcare for foreigners in the Migration Law.

That resolution concerns the decree’s healthcare provision; it does not establish that the citizenship provisions are being applied. The official legal database lists that resolution and Decree 524/2025 as the only 2 norms that amend or complement Decree 366/2025.

No committee-opinion receipt date in the Senate file

A decree of necessity and urgency is referred to Congress; Decree 366/2025 itself provides for that referral. The Senate’s file records that the decree entered the Permanent Bicameral Committee on Legislative Procedure on 10 June 2025, and gives no date for receipt of the committee’s opinion.

Searches found no qualifying-investment definition

Searches of the Official Gazette and the government’s legal database found no Economy Ministry resolution defining qualifying investments, no act by the agency on fees, procedure or an opening date, and no decree amending Decree 366/2025 or Decree 524/2025, through the Gazette edition of 25 September 2026.

Running the same Official Gazette and legal-database search over April 2026 returns Decree 285/2026, which appointed Aixa Granara as the agency’s executive director on an unpaid basis from 22 April 2026.

The search found no dedicated agency page on the government’s website. The relevant Economy Ministry announcement located was dated 30 July 2025 and describes the review procedure set by Decree 524/2025.

What the record shows at 25 September 2026

The investment route rests on a decree that one appeals court has declared void in one case. The Senate file gives no date for receipt of a committee opinion, and the searches found no published qualifying-investment criteria through 25 September 2026.

Update: On 2 October 2026 the Economy Ministry announced the programme’s amounts, including a US$350,000 contribution from a main applicant.

An earlier article published on 2 August 2026 and updated on 6 September described the framework but omitted the 30 June ruling, which predated both versions.

Limits of this reading

Whether an appeal against this ruling has been filed or decided could not be verified from the official sources reachable for this article. The chamber itself cited earlier rulings by the federal electoral judge in Entre Ríos declaring the decree unconstitutional in other citizenship applications, dated 8 August and 1 September 2025; those judgments were not independently reviewed.