The national government requested the withdrawal of the Juvenile Criminal Law Reform project after sending it to the National Congress yesterday, according to the Argentine News Agency. One of the central reasons was that the ruling party included a provision setting the age of criminal responsibility at 13, when the consensus with allied parties was 14, as had been established in last year's text. The project, which creates a new penal regime for juveniles, is very similar to the one that received a favorable opinion in May 2025, with the exception that this time the government included funding for the Public Defender's Office and the Ministry of Justice to secure financing for the effective implementation of the law. In the original project, funding was left to the discretion of the Chief of Cabinet, which raised suspicions that the law would end up being a dead letter. In the new version, more than 20 billion pesos are allocated to the Public Defender's Office and more than 3 billion pesos to the Ministry of Justice. Furthermore, the project as introduced reduces the age of criminal responsibility in Argentina from 16 to 14 years, while the previous opinion set the minimum age at 14.
