ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the precise role that the policy assigned to the courts, the judiciary's actual response and the factors that were influential in such a response. It describes this aspect of the Argentine experience on the judicial review of human rights violations. The policy inaugurated on December 13, 1983, no doubt deserves enthusiastic praise. It broke a long tradition of arbitrariness in Argentina, enhanced the value of the rule of law, and established -- at an international level -- a new model to deal with systematic human rights violations. The judicial review of human rights violations and, in particular, of state terrorism, was a good opportunity to determine whether such a break with the past was real or not. The Argentine case is a clear example of such constraints: Those in constitutional command designed a policy concerning human rights violations, but the judiciary did not fare well -- to say the least -- in its implementation of that policy.
