An Argentine federal appeals court has ruled that President Javier Milei’s government lacked authority to overhaul citizenship rules by decree in the case before it. The decision does not repeal the decree nationwide, but it challenges the legal foundation of the same decree used for Argentina’s proposed citizenship by investment route.
Sala III of the Cámara Nacional de Apelaciones en lo Civil y Comercial Federal issued the ruling on June 18, 2026, finding the citizenship reforms in DNU 366/2025 unconstitutional as applied to Yana Volosh, the foreign applicant who brought the case.
The decree made two major citizenship changes:
- It allowed foreigners to naturalize through a “relevant investment,” waiving the standard two-year residence requirement.
- It transferred authority to grant citizenship from federal judges to the National Directorate of Migration, or DNM.
Investment was not directly before the court. Volosh was an ordinary naturalization applicant who wanted her citizenship case decided by a judge rather than an administrative agency. However, the investment pathway and the transfer of jurisdiction come from the same section of the decree, so the ruling raises questions for the broader citizenship reform.
Why the Court Rejected the Decree in This Case
Volosh challenged the decree on two grounds:
- Citizenship is a matter for Congress, not unilateral executive decree.
- The decree did not meet the necessity-and-urgency conditions required by Article 99 of the Constitution.
A lower court rejected those arguments and told her to take her citizenship application to the DNM. The appeals chamber reversed that decision and ordered the federal court to reassume jurisdiction.
The court held that necessity and urgency cannot be based merely on convenience. It relied on Supreme Court precedents Verrocchi and Consumidores Argentinos, which require that Congress genuinely be unable to act before a decree can replace ordinary legislative debate.
The chamber found no such emergency. The decree was issued on May 28, 2025, while Congress was in session. Its preamble did not explain why legislation was impossible or identify a specific urgency.
Implementation also undermined the government’s urgency argument. The DNM enabled the online citizenship process only after four months and published instructions after nearly ten months, a timeline the chamber found incompatible with an emergency.
The court also emphasized that Argentine citizenship has historically required residence, generally two years, and stated that access to citizenship is “hardly compatible with the circumstantial presence of foreigners” in the country. In the court’s reasoning, fast one-off migration might justify speed, but naturalization by its nature does not.
Loss of Safeguards
The chamber also identified a flaw Volosh had not raised directly but said it could not ignore.
Under the decree’s administrative model, several traditional safeguards disappeared:
- The role of the public prosecutor under Law 27.148
- Published notices
- A period for third-party objections
- A route to appeal a citizenship denial
The court found these controls had been removed “without incorporating alternative mechanisms of equivalent publicity or control.”
This point matters beyond Volosh’s individual case because the citizenship by investment route also depends on the new administrative model created by the decree.
Narrow Legal Effect, Broader Reasoning
The ruling is legally narrow. It applies only between the parties in the case and does not strike DNU 366/2025 from the books.
Argentine courts can declare a rule unconstitutional only for the case before them. The decree remains formally in force for others unless repealed, replaced, or invalidated in another case. The government can also appeal to the Supreme Court.
The same chamber issued a similar ruling on June 25, 2026, in Michurin, another citizenship case it found “substantially analogous” to Volosh. A federal judge in Paraná had reached the same conclusion the previous August in Mondragón Herrera.
Paula Carello, a former DNM official and head of the Migration Law Institute at the Rosario Bar Association, noted that the Paraná judge never ceded jurisdiction to the DNM and continued deciding citizenship petitions directly. In Volosh, by contrast, the first-instance judge had stepped aside, and the appeals chamber ordered him to resume jurisdiction.
Carello sees the possible coexistence of two regimes:
- An administrative route through the DNM under DNU 366/2025
- A judicial route through federal courts under ordinary citizenship law
Congress has not acted on the decree. Carello said she asked the bicameral committee that reviews emergency decrees to rule on DNU 366/2025 in June 2025, but it did not respond.
Impact on Argentina’s Citizenship by Investment Plan
The ruling did not decide the legality of Argentina’s citizenship by investment pathway. No investor application was involved.
Still, the reasoning reaches the same legal foundation. The investment route and the DNM jurisdiction transfer both come from Title III of DNU 366/2025.
One possible objection is procedural: if a decree cannot reform citizenship, Congress could pass the reform by statute.
The harder problem is structural. The court criticized the administrative model for removing long-standing safeguards without equivalent replacements. The CBI route uses that same model.
The ruling also sits uneasily beside a no-residence citizenship route. The chamber did not rule on investment citizenship directly, but it described citizenship as tied to years of residence. That premise is difficult to reconcile with a passport granted through capital without time in the country.
Not all practitioners see the ruling as a direct threat. Andrés Echevarría of Vivanco & Vivanco argued that it would be a misreading to treat Volosh as a signal of instability for the CBI program, because the challenge targeted the transfer of naturalization jurisdiction rather than the investment pathway. On that view, the decree and investment route remain standing.
Program Still Lacks Key Details
Even apart from the court ruling, Argentina’s CBI plan has not become operational in full.
The source article notes several unresolved points:
- The Economy Ministry has not defined what counts as a “relevant investment.”
- The ministry annulled the master-agent tender in April 2026.
- The Agency for Citizenship by Investment Programs gained a director only in April.
- The reported US$500,000 minimum announced at the unveiling never entered the law.
This leaves the program with a legal framework but without the core regulatory details needed for practical implementation.
Existing Investor Residency Route
A separate investor residency route already exists under Article 23(d) of the Immigration Law.
Martín Hecht of MH Legal Hub said this route rests on a statute passed by Congress and is therefore insulated from the constitutional vulnerabilities affecting DNU 366/2025. He also noted that its investment thresholds are still frozen in 2010 pesos, roughly US$1,000, and could be updated by regulation without new legislation.
This is a different route from citizenship by investment. It concerns investor residency, not direct naturalization through a relevant investment.
Practical Risk for Applicants
The ruling changes the risk calculus for Argentina’s citizenship reforms.
The administrative route through the DNM may be easier to build operationally because the framework already exists and the missing pieces are mainly regulatory: a definition of “relevant investment,” procedural detail, and safeguards equivalent to those flagged by the court.
The judicial route carries a deeper legal question because the constitutional validity of the decree itself is being contested.
For ordinary naturalization applicants, the ruling shows that some courts may continue to treat citizenship as a judicial matter. For prospective investment applicants, the decree remains formally in force, but the legal basis of the route is now exposed to constitutional challenge.
The issue is not settled. The likely near-term result is uncertainty, with administrative and judicial paths potentially operating side by side until Congress, the Supreme Court, or further case law resolves the conflict.
Source article: www.imidaily.com
