Around the World Series: Argentina

by José Angel Marinaro

The cultural withdrawal that has been taking place in Argentina by force displaces the focus of attention on the necessary approaches to the various problems posed by Neuro. Hope is placed in the regional development (OAS, Parlatino, UNESCO) of Neuro rights and in expanding towards institutions such as the CNL in search of safeguarding academic and legislative production. In this last case, project 0332-D-2022 that promoted the reform of the Federal criminal procedural codification and the Execution of the sentence to regulate the introduction in both fields of neurotechnologies - in one case for its application in the evidentiary mechanisms and in the other, to encourage the introduction of novelties that technologies provide for the rehabilitative mission of persons subject to imprisonment - has lost parliamentary status. That is, it has not had any kind of attention from legislators. Thanks to a renewal promoted at the beginning of this year, it was re-entered in the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation under registration 5117-D-2024. We do not give up and that is why we are working on a Habeas Cogitationem Law project and a reform of the Penal Code with the introduction of some new criminal figures. Likewise, we are closely following a project introduced in 2023 in the Senate that seeks to create a Permanent Bicameral Commission aimed at analyzing the comprehensive protection of Neuro-rights (S-2446/2023).

However, the outlook for 2025 with an election year does not encourage good expectations. Added to this is a marked disregard for the country's scientists with strong underfunding and risks of "brain drain." The lack of attention can impact on the generation of possible regional asymmetries also in relation to the development or generation of technologies, tied as always in our region to budgetary possibilities that are always scarce and highly influenced in most cases by the voluminous external debts and the compound interest payments.

The current situation exposes us even to the maneuvers of external lobbies that seek the uncritical introduction of their normative candidates for Neurorights with disregard for other taxonomic variables, including those that we have generated in our multicultural realities.

For this reason, in the meantime, we collaborate and bring our ideas to the colleagues and parliaments that, like the Mexican one, have warned of the importance of the regulatory development of the issues linked to Neurorights, presenting, together with other interdisciplinary experts, the General Bill on Neurorights and Neurotechnologies. This happened in July of this year (2024) and we trust that this comprehensive legal body will become a reference or normative model for other countries that wish to analyze it and eventually apply it to their internal law.

We always hope that sanity will be present in Argentina and that Neuro-Rights will soon appear on the agendas of transcendent priorities.