An Argentine federal appeals court has ruled that President Javier Milei’s government had no authority to remake the country’s citizenship rules by decree. Sala III of the Cámara Nacional de Apelaciones en lo Civil y Comercial Federal handed down the decision on June 18, finding the citizenship reforms in Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) 366/2025 unconstitutional as applied to the foreigner who brought the case.
That decree is also the legal basis of Argentina’s citizenship by investment (CBI) program. Investment itself was not before the court. Yet the reasoning reaches the legal foundation on which that route rests.
For citizenship, DNU 366/2025 made two changes. One let foreigners naturalize through a “relevant investment,” waiving the standard two-year residence requirement. The other gave the National Directorate of Migration (DNM) the power to grant citizenship in place of federal judges.
What the Court Found
Yana Volosh, the applicant, fought the decree on two grounds: That the executive had no power to issue such a norm, citizenship being a matter for Congress, and that the decree satisfied none of the necessity-and-urgency conditions Article 99 of the Constitution requires. A lower court had rejected both and told her to take her citizenship application to the DNM. On appeal, the chamber reversed it.
Necessity and urgency, the judges held, are not a matter of mere convenience. In the ruling’s words, the Constitution “does not authorize bypassing debate and the intervention of Congress” to escape the timetable parliamentary lawmaking demands. Two Supreme Court precedents, Verrocchi and Consumidores Argentinos, set the test: A decree holds only when Congress genuinely cannot act.
Here, nothing qualified. The decree landed on May 28, 2025, while Congress was in session, and its preamble explained neither the impossibility of legislating nor any specific urgency. Implementation dragged: The migration directorate switched on the online citizenship process only after four months, and published the instructions after nearly ten, a sequence the chamber found impossible to square with any emergency.
Then came the point that travels furthest. Citizenship, the court reasoned, has required residence since the framers wrote it into law, as a rule two years, so access to it is “hardly compatible with the circumstantial presence of foreigners” in the country. Fast, one-off migration might justify speed; naturalization, by its nature, cannot.
The chamber then turned to a flaw Volosh had not raised, one it said it could not overlook “although it does not arise from the arguments made by the appellant.” Gone were the public prosecutor’s role under Law 27.148, the published notices, and the window for third-party objections, with no route to appeal a citizenship denial. Those controls vanished, the ruling found, “without incorporating alternative mechanisms of equivalent publicity or control.”
A Narrow Ruling, a Broad Rationale
On its face, the order is narrow. It revokes the lower decision “insofar as it dismissed the unconstitutionality of decree 366/2025” and directs the federal court to “reassume the jurisdiction it declined” over Volosh’s application. For everyone else, the decree still stands.
Its reach is inter partes, not erga omnes. Argentine courts can find a norm unconstitutional only for the case before them, and the finding neither repeals the rule nor strikes it from the books; the law simply goes unapplied for that litigant. Sala III is an appeals chamber as well, so the government can still take the question to the Supreme Court.
Nor is it the chamber’s only such ruling: A week later, on June 25, the same judges ruled the same way in Michurin, a separate citizenship case they found “substantially analogous” to the Volosh ruling. A federal judge in Paraná had reached the same conclusion the previous August, in the Mondragón Herrera case.
Paula Carello, a former DNM official, notes that the federal judge in Paraná (Entre Ríos province) never ceded jurisdiction in the first place; he simply keeps deciding citizenship petitions directly, the way courts always have. In Volosh’s case, by contrast, the first-instance judge did step aside in favor of the DNM, and it took an appeals chamber to order him to reassume jurisdiction.
She reads this as “the possible coexistence of two regimes,” one administrative, running through the DNM under the decree, and one judicial, running through federal courts under the ordinary law, operating side by side. She suspects this judicial track may be holding firm beyond Paraná too, though confirming that would take a broader review of federal courts nationwide.
Congress, for its part, has stayed silent. Carello, who heads the Migration Law Institute at the Rosario Bar Association, asked the bicameral committee that reviews emergency decrees to rule on 366/2025 in June 2025, and said it never answered. “When the one parliamentary check on emergency decrees stops functioning,” she observed, “decrees like this simply stay in force by default, regardless of their merits.”
Why It Reaches the Investment Pathway
No investment application was before the court. Volosh is an ordinary naturalization applicant who wanted a judge, not an agency, to decide her case. Yet the investment route and the jurisdiction transfer come from the same overhaul of the citizenship law, Title III of the decree, so the logic that sank one applies cleanly to the other.
On two fronts, the reasoning cuts deeper than the lone outcome suggests. A first objection, that a decree cannot reform citizenship, has a remedy: Congress could pass the reform itself.
The second is harder to cure; the chamber faulted the new administrative model for stripping longstanding safeguards without equivalent replacements, and the CBI route runs on that same model.
Residence cuts the same way. Nowhere does the ruling mention the investment route, so it did not rule against the no-residence model. But its premise, that citizenship presupposes years of residence, sits uneasily beside a passport that capital can secure without time in the country.
Not every practitioner sees a threat to the program. Andrés Echevarría, partner and chairman at Vivanco & Vivanco, said it would be “a misreading of Volosh to treat it as a signal of instability for the CBI program,” because the challenge went after the transfer of naturalization jurisdiction, not the investment route.
On that reading, he argues, “the decree stands, the investment pathway stands.”
In practice, the program has stalled regardless. Officials at the Economy Ministry have still not defined what counts as a “relevant investment”; the ministry annulled the master-agent tender in April; and the Agency for Citizenship by Investment Programs gained a director only that same month. Even the US$500,000 minimum reported at the unveiling never made it into law.
Some point to a steadier path already on the books. Martín Hecht, founder of MH Legal Hub, notes that Article 23(d) of the Immigration Law lets investors obtain residency under a statute Congress passed, one he calls “completely insulated from the constitutional vulnerabilities of the current decree.”
He argues its investment thresholds, frozen in 2010 pesos at roughly US$1,000, could be refreshed by regulation alone, without new legislation.
What shifts now is the risk calculus. A program that leaned partly on Argentine institutions and judicial independence now meets a judiciary using that independence to question the very instrument that built it.
Carello calls the question “an open one,” not a settled one; courts like the one in Paraná keep naturalizing applicants directly through the ordinary judicial process, while Volosh and Michurin show an appeals chamber routing that same outcome through the courts instead of the DNM. In her view, this likely won’t resolve into a single answer soon; “I think we’re going to end up with two coexisting paths, not one settled answer.”
The two paths don’t carry equal weight, though. The administrative route is arguably the steadier of the two: The framework already exists, and what’s missing is mostly regulatory -a final definition of “relevant investment,” procedural detail, the safeguards the chamber flagged as absent.
The judicial route carries something heavier: The decree’s constitutional validity itself is still being contested in court. Which path applies to a given applicant changes not just the kind of risk involved, but how deep it runs.
