The Filing
On June 19, 2026, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Paraguayan digital-rights group TEDIC, and the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights challenging Paraguay for refusing to disclose basic information about how it deploys facial recognition technology nationwide.
TEDIC's executive director Maricarmen Sequera had submitted a formal information request to the Ministry of the Interior and National Police seeking documentation any responsible government should be able to produce: human rights and data protection impact assessments conducted before deployment, implementation protocols, procedures to prevent abuse, and risk mitigation strategies. The state denied the request in full, characterising everything requested as confidential security data. Paraguayan courts upheld the denial. With domestic remedies exhausted, the three organisations turned to the IACHR, invoking the established Inter-American standard that blanket national-security claims cannot substitute for specific, content-based justification for withholding public information.
What Paraguay Is Actually Running
Consider the scale of what the Paraguayan state refuses to explain. According to TEDIC's investigative research, the National Police began acquiring facial recognition-enabled cameras in 2018 — 44 of an initial 154-camera purchase. By 2024, Paraguay had more than 1,641 surveillance cameras installed nationwide. At least 13 public bodies now acknowledge possessing the technology, including the National Directorate of Migration, the Civil Aeronautics authority, several governorships, and the Chamber of Senators. Part of the build-out was funded by redirecting the Universal Service Fund — a mechanism created to expand internet access in underserved communities — toward surveillance equipment instead.
The performance record raises proportionality questions the government has refused to answer publicly. TEDIC's research found that between 2019 and 2023, the facial recognition systems generated just 137 alerts across all deployments over four years. Advocates for police surveillance technology will correctly note that deterrence effects are real even when overt detections are low, and that a handful of operational details can legitimately remain confidential. But the petition does not ask for configurations that could help bad actors defeat the cameras. It asks whether the state bothered to assess the human rights implications before deploying mass biometric surveillance across 13 agencies. Paraguay has treated even that question as a state secret.
The Legal Standard at Stake
The IACHR petition rests on settled Inter-American standards. The Commission has long held that national security cannot function as a blanket exemption from the right to access information. A document is classified because of what it contains — not because the agency holding it prefers not to be asked about it. Paraguay's response, denying the entire request without specific justification, failed this threshold from the first paragraph.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights reinforced the framework in its March 2024 ruling in Colectivo de Abogados y Abogadas "José Alvear Restrepo" (CAJAR) v. Colombia (Series C No. 506). The Court recognised informational self-determination as an autonomous human right — the right to access and control information a government holds about you — and held that states conducting surveillance must meet rigorous criteria and controls, with judicial oversight. Paraguay's courts deferred entirely to the executive's classification claim rather than examining the substance of what was withheld. That is precisely the kind of judicial abdication the Court's standards are designed to prevent.
The New Data Protection Law Does Not Close the Gap
Paraguay enacted its first comprehensive personal data protection law, Law No. 7593/2025, on November 27, 2025. This was a genuine reform, one that TEDIC itself helped advocate for over several years of legislative debate. But the law does not take effect until November 2027, leaving the current surveillance infrastructure operating under no comprehensive legal framework. More critically, Article 2 exempts processing related to public security, national defence, immigration policy, and criminal prosecution from coverage — the exact agencies running the facial recognition network. This exemption pattern is common globally, which is precisely why a transparency right independent of data protection law matters: if the data protection framework will not reach the security sector, and domestic courts defer to executive secrecy, the IACHR petition is not a fallback — it is the primary accountability mechanism available.
A Regional Pattern
Paraguay is not exceptional. At least 83 facial recognition initiatives have been documented across Latin America, with 53 active as of recent counts. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay all deployed systems around 2019-2020, largely before legal frameworks existed to govern them. Paraguay's own 2024 Sports Violence Law (Law 7269/2024) extended mandatory facial recognition to football stadiums with no legal requirement for impact assessments, and a USD 1.73 million contract for the system was signed months before the law passed. The international accuracy record is sobering context: a Cardiff trial in 2017 produced 2,297 false positives from 2,470 system matches — an error rate that causes wrongful stops at scale and that governments can only be held accountable for if they publish their performance data.
What Proportionate Accountability Looks Like
The petition's remedies are measured: disclosure of what assessments were conducted, permanent mechanisms for transparency about surveillance acquisitions and use, and mandatory human rights impact assessments before future deployments. None of this bans the technology or undermines legitimate law enforcement. It asks the state to meet the evidentiary standard any democratic government should satisfy before running mass biometric surveillance against its own population.
The IACHR lacks the direct enforcement power of a domestic court, but its findings carry significant legal and reputational weight across the hemisphere. A ruling that Paraguay's secrecy failed Inter-American standards would create precedent pressing every government in the region deploying surveillance technology to publicly justify its use — proportionate accountability, grounded in existing law, and long overdue.