On 12 August 2026 the federal court in Esquel declared articles 4, 37 and 39 of DNU 366/2025 unconstitutional and inapplicable. Those articles required “legal residence” for citizenship. The court barred applying them retroactively to a resident of Chubut who had applied for citizenship.
On 12 August 2026 Guido Sebastián Otranto, the federal judge in Esquel, declared articles 4, 37 and 39 of Decree DNU 366/2025 unconstitutional and inapplicable. The case was brought by a Russian citizen who lives in Chubut and had applied for Argentine citizenship.
Those articles rewrote Law No. 346 on naturalization. In place of the earlier rules, the decree required “legal residence”, residencia legal, and allowed the immigration service to measure a person’s stay against a stricter standard. The court barred that standard from being applied to the applicant retroactively.
Why the court found no urgency
The decree was issued as a measure of necessity and urgency. The judge compared that claim with the way the procedure was actually started. Migraciones opened the digital citizenship application only on 6 October 2025, more than four months after the decree. The instructions were published in March 2026, almost ten months later. For the court, that delay shows there was no immediate emergency that would justify bypassing Congress.
What was decided in this case
The court took the application back. It will be heard under the rules in force before the decree: article 2, subsection 1, and article 6 of Law No. 346, together with article 20 of Law No. 25.871. The new requirements of DNU 366/2025 do not apply to this applicant.
This is a first-instance judgment, and it concerns one person. It does not replace the 30 June 2026 ruling of the Cámara Nacional Electoral, which declared the whole decree null. For people who had already filed, or who had been living in the country under the old rules, the judge’s separate point matters: the tighter “legal residence” test cannot be switched on retroactively. The court tied that conclusion to the delay with which the administration itself launched the new procedure.
CoMiRa will keep collecting these provincial decisions. Two reference points now sit side by side. The general one is the nullity of the decree in the national electoral court. The particular one is a refusal to apply the new articles to cases already open, as in Esquel. The government’s appeal to the Supreme Court against the Chamber’s ruling is still undecided.