Amendment Agenda: Focus on the Judiciary

1. Argentine Executive Branch - Ministry of Justice and Human Rights

The Argentine Executive Branch, through Decree 182/18, decided to create a commission within the scope of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights to prepare, within six months of its constitution, a preliminary draft of the Civil and Commercial Code´s partial reform, in force since August 2015. This commission will be comprised of Julio César Rivera, Ramón Daniel Pizarro and Diego Botana; the Academic Secretary is Agustina Díaz Cordero; and the “ad hoc” Secretary is Marcelo Alejandro Rufino.

On the other hand, the Argentine Ministry of Justice and Human Rights has developed since 2016 a program called “Justice 2020”. Justice 2020 is a digital platform for citizen’s participation in the generation of projects and proposals, whose aim is to achieve a comprehensive transformation of the institutions of the justice system. The initiatives are presented in seven areas: Institutional, Criminal, Civil, Access to Justice, Management, Human Rights, and Justice and Community. In this framework, several proposals were developed including the followings:

1. Improving oral comprehension in civil knowledge processes of the Argentine Judiciary
2. Management and organization for civil justice
3. Grounds for Civil and Commercial Procedural Reform
4. Open Justice - Judicial Data Porta
5. Organization of the Criminal Judicial Office
6. Organization of the Criminal Judicial Enforcement Office
7. Draft Law on Collective Proceedings
8. Draft Law Model for the creation of a judicial team specialized in intra-family, sexual and institutional violence
9. Draft Law on Family Proceedings
10. Expansion of alternative methods of conflict resolution.
11. Improve law skills which were underestimated and overlooked (e.g. professional ethics, negotiation & mediation and litigation skills, among others)
12. Judicial Investigations Federal Body

The general coordinator of Justice 2020, Dr. Ricardo Gil Lavedra, offered the Argentine Supreme Court (CSJN, after its acronym in Spanish) access to his experts and the documents that had been drawn up by each of these commissions so that the CSJN might align itself with the recent proposal of transformation.

2. Judiciary

In February 2018, the CSJN presented a document called “"Guidelines for a State Policy for the Transformation of the Judiciary, Advocacy and Legal Education", calling all jurisdictions and the federal, national, provincial and of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires judicial powers to participate in this process.

The CSJN aims to strengthen judiciary independence, update institutions and processes, guide its operation to achieve greater access, equality and inclusion of citizens and bolster the rule of law. In particular, digitalization of files, extending opening hours to the general public and improving orality in the civil process are all fundamental to fulfilling these goals.

The first step of the CSJN’s initiative was to issue, in February 2018 a document called "Guidelines for the Transformation of the Judicial Powers" that contains the work proposal to be carried out by these nine committees:

1. Speeding-up of lawsuits regarding: drug trafficking, corruption, human trafficking
2. Civil and Commercial Jurisdiction
3. Labor and Social Security Jurisdiction
4. Electoral Jurisdiction
5. Access to Justice
6. Institutional Organization of the Judiciary
7. Organization of the judges, officials and judicial employees work
8. New technologies
9. Legal education  

These commissions are comprised of judges and are working on the conclusions that will act as a starting point for the reform. These documents will be published on the website of the Judicial Information Center so that the legal community can provide feedback.