Supreme Court of Argentina

Supreme Court of Argentina (in Spanish, Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación) is the highest court of law of the Argentine Republic. It was inaugurated on 15 January 1863. However, during much of the 20th century, the Court and, in general, the Argentine judicial system, has lacked autonomy from the executive power. The Court has recently been reformed (in 2003) by the decree 222/03.

The Supreme Court functions as a last resort tribunal. Its rulings cannot be appealed. It also decides on cases dealing with the interpretation of the constitution (for example, it can overturn a law passed by Congress if it deems it unconstitutional).

The members of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President and can only be removed by an impeachment process called juicio político ("political trial"), carried out by the Senate, exclusively on grounds of improper behaviour.

The Palace of Justice was designed by French architect Norbert Maillart in 1906, and was initially inaugurated in 1910. Subsequent works, both logisltical and aesthetic, continued until 1942, and among its most noteworthy monuments are Justice, by Rogelio Yrurtia, and José de San Martín, by Luis Perlotti.

The current composition of the Supreme Court is as follows:

President: Dr. Ricardo Luis Lorenzetti.

Vice-President: Dra. Elena I. Highton de Nolasco.

Justices: Dr. Carlos S. Fayt

Dr. Juan Carlos Maqueda

Dr. Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni

Dr. Enrique Santiago Petracchi

Dra. Carmen María Argibay.

Until the 2000s, the Court lacked independence from the executive branch in many cases. Several of its justices were accused of forming an "automatic majority", who consistently agreed on votes having to do with interests of the administration. Authors have underlined a sort of "spoils system", leading to changes of the Court's composition following each new political majority . The Supreme Court has been characterized by both "instability in its composition" and inconsistency in its rulings . However, reforms in 1994 and 2003 have improved the democratic character of the Court.

The 1994 constitutional reform slightly changed the mode of nomination of the justices: although they were still proposed by the executive power and approved by the Senate, an absolute majority was no longer needed. 2/3 of the votes of the present parliamentarians was sufficient for approval . Furthermore, it also introduced amparo, hábeas corpus and hábeas data.

In the 2000s, since the interim presidency of Eduardo Duhalde and especially during the term of Néstor Kirchner which started in 2003, all members of Menem's "majority" have either been removed or resigned. Dr. Antonio Boggiano, the last of these, was removed on 29 September 2005. Not all justices were replaced, so there were still two vacancies.

The amicus curiae figure, allowing third parties to a case to depose a written text before the Court in order to defend general interest, was then formalized . The amicus curiae process was used in 2001, when Spanish justice sent an international arrest warrant for responsibles of human rights violations in Argentina . An NGO then deposed a text, as third party, before the Argentine court, bringing forth the judicial arguments needed to either extradite or judge suspects of human rights violations (an alternative known as subsidiary universal jurisdiction) .

This change was an important phase in the 2005 ruling which stated that crimes of forced disappearances were crimes against humanity (Caso Simon) . Two years earlier, the Congress had declared the amnesty laws (1986 Ley de Punto Final and 1987 Ley de Obediencia Debida) unconstitutional, thus opening up the way for the trials of suspects of human rights violations during the dictatorship.

The renewal of the Supreme Court in the first years of the Kirchner administration was advertised and is usually acknowledged as a positive step, bringing more independence to the Judicial Branch and addressing issues of ideological bias. Until mid-2004 all justices were male, most were devout Catholics, and they were considered conservative. In contrast, the two most recently appointed justices (Elena Highton and Carmen Argibay) are female; Argibay, former ad litem judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and former president of the International Association of Women Judges, is a self-professed feminist and atheist, who supports the legalization of abortion in Argentina . Eugenio Zaffaroni (the first to be designated through the public nomination method) is viewed as a politically center-left-wing guarantist Justice, and also a scholar close to critical criminology