We have filed a class-action petition for judicial protection in the Federal Administrative Court seeking a ruling that Emergency Decree No. 941/2025 is illegal and unconstitutional, as it weakens the limits and controls placed on intelligence agencies. The changes introduced by the decree shift the focus of Argentina’s intelligence agency (SIDE) from national security to counterintelligence. The decree increases the power of the agency to monitor and control anything the Executive Branch defines as a risk or internal threat, impacting the public’s freedom to engage in political and social activities.
The decree, for example, enables intelligence agents to detain individuals without a warrant or any other judicial oversight, even though the Constitution bars the Executive from using emergency decrees to legislate on criminal matters. Nevertheless, the decree allows agents to carry out these detentions in the course of their intelligence activities, including when they witness a crime in progress. To do so, they need not notify a judge, only other security forces.
The Emergency Decree’s stated grounds for triggering this new authority are sweeping and vague. This allows for arrests to be made without any concrete suspicion that a crime has occurred or minimum threshold of suspicion that the person being detained had any involvement in the activity.
Prior to the changes, the Intelligence Law (25,520) prevented intelligence agents from influencing the country’s political, social, or economic situation, the activities of political parties, or public opinion, among many other areas. This new decree allows agents to sidestep such restrictions when conducting counterintelligence activities, the scope of which have been arbitrarily redefined and expanded without any clear limit on what those activities now encompass.
The decree also authorizes intelligence agencies to request personal data from any national or provincial government agency without any external oversight and without having to demonstrate that the request serves a national security purpose. It further authorizes SIDE to share that information with other domestic or foreign entities. This means that sensitive personal data the government collects from individuals—such as data held by the civil registry , immigration authorities, or social security administration—may be used, stored, and disclosed without civilian oversight or any independent external review, and without any specified purpose. Under the previous law, such disclosure would have required a prior court order.
The decree broadly expands the grounds that authorize the State to carry out intelligence activities, and loosens the constraints on its authority to interfere with various rights and guarantees. The lawsuit seeks to protect constitutional rights including freedom of action and social and political participation, informational self-determination, personal liberty and freedom of movement, privacy, and due process.
The changes introduced by the decree do not constitute merely an administrative restructuring, they amount to direct restrictions on and invasions into our spheres of autonomy and social action, enacted through an instrument of low democratic legitimacy. The decree was not even issued with a clear and precise justification for its use, nor does it explain why the matter cannot wait for ordinary democratic deliberation. For all these reasons, we request that the court immediately enjoin the decree’s provisions that affect constitutional rights, and to that end, that the judicial recess be lifted.