Ley 25.326 Art. 20 — judicial and administrative decisions may not rest solely on automated profiling
Binds Courts issuing judicial decisions and public bodies issuing administrative acts in Argentina where the decision appraises or evaluates human conduct, whatever the underlying data file (Art. 20 sits in Chapter III, on the rights of data subjects, and applies alongside the general scope in Art. 1). Impact tier: all entities in the sense that any public or private data file feeding such a decision is exposed to the nullity, but the duty itself falls on the public decision-maker.. Art. 20 of the Ley de Protección de los Datos Personales (Ley 25.326), headed 'Impugnación de valoraciones personales', provides that judicial decisions and administrative acts which involve the appraisal or evaluation of human conduct may not have as their sole basis the result of automated processing of personal data that yields a definition of the data subject's profile or personality, and that acts contrary to that rule are incurably void ('insanablemente nulos'). It is Argentina's only in-force statutory constraint on automated decision-making: unlike LGPD Art. 20 in Brazil or PIPA Art. 37-2 in Korea it confers no request-for-review procedure and does not reach private-sector recommender systems or algorithmic work dispatch, and its remedy is nullity of the act rather than a right exercised against a controller. The related access right in Art. 15 requires information held about the subject to be supplied in clear form, and Art. 43 of the Constitution supplies the habeas data action used to enforce Chapter VII.
Ley 25.326 was sanctioned 4 October 2000 and partially promulgated by Decreto 995/2000, published in the Boletín Oficial on 2 November 2000. The law contains no commencement clause, so the residual rule of the Código Civil then in force (Art. 2, Ley 340) applied — laws bind after the eight days following official publication — giving 11 November 2000. Art. 20 was not among the provisions vetoed by Decreto 995/2000, which struck only points 2 and 3 of Art. 29 inc. 1 and Art. 47; the text was read in the Ministerio de Justicia InfoLeg consolidated version, which records the veto history in its Antecedentes Normativos. The commencement date is a derivation from the residual civil-law rule rather than a date stated in the instrument; the substance of the article, and the fact that it binds today, are not in doubt. Added in the AIL-211 LATAM coverage-symmetry sweep as Argentina's nearest peer of cn-pipl-art24 and br-lgpd-art20; no Argentine in-force peer of the recommendation off-switch (CAC Art. 17) or algorithmic work dispatch (CAC Art. 20) was found.
Stated maximum penalty — The sanction attached to Art. 20 itself is civil: an act founded solely on automated profiling is incurably void (Art. 20.2), which the data subject may pursue through the habeas data action of Arts. 33-43. Separately, Art. 31 empowers the supervisory authority (now the Agencia de Acceso a la Información Pública) to impose a warning, suspension, a fine of ARS 1,000 to ARS 100,000, or closure or cancellation of the data file, without prejudice to civil damages and to the criminal offences in Arts. 117 bis and 157 bis of the Código Penal; the peso figures are the un-indexed statutory amounts as enacted in 2000.