The Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina dismissed an action against a presidential decree allowing the sale of rural land to foreigners, as a court of first instance had considered unconstitutional in 2024.
© Lusa
30/09/2026
by
Lusa
The highest Argentine court argued, Tuesday, that the Centro de Ex-Combatentes das Ilhas Malvinas (CECIM), of the city of La Plata, is not an organization with the legitimacy necessary to make such a complaint, which stated that the Milei measure put at risk national sovereignty.
The Supreme Court judgment indicated that the action does not correspond to a concrete damage to sovereignty and rejected it.
The decree signed by Milei in December 2023 established an extensive series of reforms to the Argentine legal system in multiple respects, was debated for months at the National Congress and generated a large number of disputes in the courts.
Law No 26.737, which was repealed by Article 154 of the Milei decree, established a limit of sale or possession by companies or foreign persons of 15% of the total rural land.
The CECIM, composed of former soldiers of the 1982 Malvinas War, obtained, in March 2024, a favorable decision in a court in La Plata, which declared Article 154 of Decree 70/2023 unconstitutional.
The Argentinean Executive responded with an extraordinary appeal that led the final decision on the matter to the Supreme Court.
“The Court solved Milei’s political problem. You just put, on September 29, the Argentine Republic for sale. He has just told the whole world that if they want, they can come to buy municipalities, provinces, border areas, rivers, valleys, forests, ravines, including the Falklands,” CECIM said in a statement released on Tuesday.
In 2026, the Milei government attempted to change the regime of selling land to foreigners by means of a bill that it sent to Congress, which generated large protests and so far only received partial approval in the Senate, although with significant changes.
The draft law on the inviolability of private property, according to the Government, aimed to eliminate restrictions that limit ownership rights and strengthen legal certainty to attract investments.
The most controversial chapter of the project, which reduced the restrictions on the purchase of land by foreign private people and companies and which generated strong malaise in society, was eliminated by the government bench in the Senate on the eve of the debate last August.
At the last moment, after the intervention of all senators and after hours of debates, the chapter was also removed from the law on the use of land burned by fires in rural areas, one of the most criticized, especially by environmentalists.