Argentina
Practice Relating to Rule 129. The Act of Displacement
Argentina’s Law of War Manual (1969) provides:
Protected persons may not be transferred to a power which is not party to the 1949 Geneva Convention IV … In no case may a protected person be transferred to a State where he or she has reason to fear persecution on account of his or her political opinions or religious beliefs.
The manual also provides:
Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying Power or to that of another country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.
Argentina’s Law of War Manual (1989) states that “illegal deportations and transfers” constitute grave breaches.
Argentina’s Law of War Manual (1969) provides: “The belligerents shall endeavour to conclude agreements for the removal from besieged areas of wounded, sick, elderly [and] maternity cases.”
The manual further states:
Nevertheless, the occupying Power may undertake total or partial evacuation of a given area if the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand. Evacuations may involve the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the occupied territory only in case of material impossibility.
Argentina’s Law of War Manual (1989) provides that, with respect to non-international armed conflicts, “displacement of the population shall not be ordered unless their security or imperative military reasons so demand”.
Argentina’s Constitution (1994), as well as a number of decrees issued between 1974 and 1977, authorize the President, in cases where a state of emergency has been declared, to arrest and transfer persons from one part of the territory to another, unless such persons choose instead to leave the country. In some cases, however, the option to leave the country may be suspended by invoking the need to safeguard essential State interests.