What the State pays for losing lawsuits

Year by year

Current budget credit for expense objects with a judicial cause, converted to today's pesos via the Unidad Indexada. Without that conversion, eleven years of inflation lift any series while nothing has actually changed.

• 2011$ 1,11 mil M
• 2012$ 1,08 mil M
• 2013$ 3,1 M partial year: 10 bodies
• 2014$ 43,2 M partial year: 10 bodies
• 2015$ 8,7 M partial year: 10 bodies
• 2016$ 1,57 mil M
• 2017$ 1,1 M partial year: 3 bodies
• 2018$ 10,8 M partial year: 4 bodies
• 2019$ 2,92 mil M no execution published
• 2020$ 2,68 mil M no execution published
• 2021$ 3,08 mil M no execution published

The bar shows budgeted credit, not what was actually paid. Files from 2019 onward publish execution as zero for every row, not only the judicial ones. In the years that do carry it, the judgments line is spent almost in full, which is why the credit is the best available measure of what the State ends up paying.

The series ends in 2021 because the source ends there: OPP stopped updating budget credit broken down by expense object in July 2022, and no other body publishes the national budget at that level of detail. We checked the open-data catalogue for later years — there are none.

For what reason

The official name of each expense object declares the cause. Compensation with no declared cause is listed separately: it may be a judgment or an expropriation, and the budget does not say.

• Court judgments$ 7,96 mil M 142 budget lines
• Health injunctions (drugs and supplies)$ 3,51 mil M 10 budget lines
• Judicial settlements$ 1,03 mil M 11 budget lines
• Compensation with no declared cause$ 352 M 25 budget lines

Which bodies

Eleven-year total in today's pesos. The central line sits with the Ministry of Economy, which pays judgments against the State under article 52 of Law 17.930.

• Diversos Créditos · Dir. Gral. de Secretaría (M.E.F.)$ 8,1 mil M
• Ministerio de Salud Pública$ 3,51 mil M
• Poder Judicial$ 949 M
• Mtrio. de Vivienda,Ordenamiento Territorial y Medio Ambiente$ 70,3 M
• Ministerio del Interior$ 65,7 M
• Presidencia de la República$ 34,4 M
• Diversos Créditos · Ministerio de Ganadería, Agricultura y Pesca$ 24,7 M
• Poder Legislativo$ 22,5 M
• Diversos Créditos · Presidencia de la República$ 22 M
• Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas$ 14,7 M
• Universidad de la República$ 7,7 M
• Administración Nacional de Educación Pública$ 6,1 M

The detail

188 budget lines · the filters narrow this table, not the figures above

What still cannot be known

Uruguay has no public list of the damages the State pays under court judgment. These are the three sources that would hold the case-by-case record, and why none of them is enough.

• The National Jurisprudence Database publishes over 100,000 judgments, but the award amount sits inside the text rather than in a field, and there is no way to query it in bulk.
• The Single Registry of State Lawsuits (Decree 98/019) does hold the amounts for every lawsuit the State is party to. It is not public: in 2024 a freedom-of-information request returned 3,076 lawsuits for 2023 and roughly USD 132 million identified, without naming the body or the cause.
• The Administrative Claims Court annuls administrative acts but does not award damages, so its rulings carry no amounts.