Supreme Court Implements Judicial Anonymization Tool

The Argentine Supreme Court implemented the Judicial Document Anonymization Tool, a platform designed to protect personal data included in rulings, reports, court records, and other documents before they are published or disclosed to third parties. The tool, developed by the Supreme Court’s Systems Directorate, is available to courts and other agencies of the Argentine Federal Judiciary. At this initial stage, it can process .docx and .pdf files and automatically identify more than 15 categories of information.

The data it can recognize include individuals’ names, addresses, identity documents, tax ID numbers, professional license numbers, email addresses, telephone numbers, bank account details, IP addresses, usernames, URLs, and information related to court proceedings. Once a document has been processed, the platform replaces the selected information with generic placeholders, such as “[Person 1]”, “[ID Number 1]”, or “[Place 1]”. In this way, it seeks to preserve the legal meaning and coherence of the text without revealing the identity of the parties or third parties.

According to the Systems Directorate, documents are processed on secure servers and deleted immediately after processing. The platform also allows users to customize the protection criteria applied before judgments and decisions are made publicly available.

Human review remains mandatory before the document is downloaded or disclosed. The Supreme Court noted that, since automated tools cannot guarantee error-free detection, the operator must verify the final result to ensure compliance with habeas data and personal data protection regulations.

The implementation of this tool forms part of the Supreme Court’s digital transformation and privacy enhancement initiatives and was supported by a contribution from the International Open Justice Network.