Buenos Aires first-instance ruling declaring the Fugitive Facial Recognition System (SRFP) unconstitutional (7 September 2022)

On 7 September 2022, a first-instance judge of the Contencioso Administrativo y Tributario court of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires declared the Fugitive Facial Recognition System (SRFP) unconstitutional as implemented by the Buenos Aires City Government — the first Argentine judicial ruling to strike down a deployed public-space biometric surveillance system on constitutional grounds, and the first in the Southern Cone to apply the amparo mechanism against facial recognition technology in state use.

The system

The Sistema de Reconocimiento Facial de Prófugos (SRFP, Fugitive Facial Recognition System) was launched in 2019 by the Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, integrated into the city's existing video surveillance infrastructure and operated on software supplied by Danaide, a private contractor. The system scanned live CCTV feeds from public spaces — including the Buenos Aires subway and public squares — against the national CONARC database (Consulta de Rebeldías y Capturas), which holds records of active outstanding fugitive warrants. The CONARC database contained approximately 35,000 active entries.

The system was suspended in April 2020 during the pandemic. When the amparo litigation opened the city's operational records to court-directed scrutiny, the scale of the SRFP's operation became public for the first time: across its active period, the system had made 9,392,372 biometric requests against that database — a ratio of more than 260 biometric scans per active fugitive record. At least 15,459 of those searches involved individuals who were not listed as fugitives in the CONARC database at all. A total of 356 search records had been manually erased from the system without an audit trail. Seventeen user accounts designated only as "admin" — unidentifiable by name or role — held unrestricted access to the system's biometric data store. No data-protection impact assessment had been performed before or during the system's operation. False-positive matches had caused documented wrongful detentions of between one and three hours.

The litigation

The legal challenge took the form of an amparo — Argentina's constitutional-protection action against rights-violating exercises of public authority — filed in December 2020 by the Observatorio de Derecho Informático Argentino (ODIA), a Buenos Aires-based digital-rights civil association. The Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), Argentina's pre-eminent human rights legal centre, joined the action as an intervenor — combining civil-society digital-rights standing with human-rights legal-centre standing in the same case record. Fundación Vía Libre, Córdoba-based and one of Latin America's principal digital-rights-and-AI civil-society organisations, participated as friend of the court (amicus curiae), contributing technical and human-rights arguments. The Asociación por los Derechos Civiles also participated as amicus. The Buenos Aires City Government was the respondent; the Public Prosecutor's Office later became an additional appellant at the appellate stage.

The ruling

On 7 September 2022, Judge Elena Liberatori of the Juzgado de Primera Instancia en lo Contencioso Administrativo y Tributario de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires declared the SRFP unconstitutional as implemented, ordering the suspension of the system. The ruling rested on four mutually reinforcing grounds: the absence of required oversight mechanisms and control structures; the system's reliance on a database with serious documented flaws — including searches against thousands of non-fugitive individuals and 356 manually erased records without audit trail; the pattern of unrestricted anonymous access by seventeen unidentifiable "admin" accounts in breach of any accountability framework; and the failure to conduct a data-protection impact assessment before a biometric surveillance system of this scale entered public-space operation. The ruling did not permanently prohibit facial recognition technology in Buenos Aires — it found the SRFP's implementation unconstitutional as actually run, and suspended the system pending compliance with the legal framework the city had failed to observe.

Appellate confirmation

Both the Buenos Aires City Government and the Public Prosecutor's Office appealed the ruling. On 28 April 2023 Chamber I of the Court of Appeals of the City of Buenos Aires upheld Judge Liberatori's ruling and conditioned any reinstatement of the SRFP on three requirements: the establishment and proper functioning of oversight bodies; an independent investigation into whether the system discriminated against individuals based on personal characteristics; and public disclosure of the system's operations and reporting. An expert report produced during the appellate proceedings found that the Buenos Aires City Police had conducted approximately ten million queries on 7.5 million individuals, violating Law 5688, which restricts SRFP searches to CONARC-listed fugitives or persons subject to a court order. As of early 2024, the system remained suspended pending a sentence-execution hearing to determine whether the city had met the appellate conditions.

Significance

The 7 September 2022 ruling is the corpus's first event in Argentina and the first in the Southern Cone with the shape of a first-instance constitutional-law judicial ruling — closing one of the corpus's sharpest regional event-coverage gaps. Until this entry, the corpus's Event slice included no Argentine entries and no Southern Cone civil-society litigation events of any kind, despite the region carrying two of the corpus's principal organizational anchors (Fundación Vía Libre and Derechos Digitales).

The SRFP ruling is the case widely cited in Latin American digital-rights practice as the foundational precedent demonstrating that the amparo mechanism — Argentina's constitutional-protection summary action — can be successfully deployed against biometric mass-surveillance infrastructure operated by a city government. The three-role coalition it produced — digital-rights civil association as plaintiff (ODIA), human-rights legal centre as intervenor (CELS), digital-rights-and-AI NGO as amicus curiae (Fundación Vía Libre) — maps the Buenos Aires civil-society infrastructure for algorithmic-surveillance litigation onto a single case record. The same civil-society field deployed a closely parallel multi-organisation structure two and a half years later at the 7 March 2025 IACHR regional hearing on artificial intelligence and human rights, where Fundación Vía Libre again appeared — this time as one of twelve registered speakers before the Inter-American Commission — raising predictive-algorithm state surveillance and the criminalisation of dissent as the Argentine substantive contribution to the regional record.

The Fundación Vía Libre commentary on the SRFP case frames it explicitly as a methodology question — what does auditing artificial surveillance look like under Argentine constitutional law? — and the three appellate conditions (independent audit, regulatory control mechanisms, privacy impact assessment) are the practical answer the court supplied. That framing positions the ruling as one concrete answer to the question the corpus's broader algorithmic-accountability field is working toward: what does a successful judicial outcome on public-space biometric surveillance look like when the institutional infrastructure for outright prohibition does not exist?