Italy’s Constitutional Court has issued its first major substantive ruling on the sweeping ius sanguinis reforms enacted in 2025. The Court rejected all of the constitutional challenges brought before it – but the reasoning it used, and the questions it deliberately left unanswered, matter enormously for anyone pursuing or planning an Italian citizenship claim by descent.

Background: What Changed in 2025?

For well over a century, Italian citizenship law operated on a principle of unlimited transmission by descent (iure sanguinis). A person could be recognised as an Italian citizen regardless of how many generations separated them from their Italian-born ancestor, and regardless of whether they had any actual connection to Italy. Hundreds of thousands of people – particularly from Latin America – pursued recognition on this basis, flooding Italian consulates and courts with applications.

In March 2025, the Italian government moved rapidly to close this avenue. Decree-Law No. 36 of 28 March 2025, converted into Law No. 74 of 23 May 2025, inserted a new Article 3-bis into the Italian Citizenship Act (Law No. 91 of 1992). In blunt terms, the new provision declares that anyone born abroad who holds another citizenship is deemed never to have acquired Italian citizenship – retroactively, going back decades or even centuries – unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.

The Exceptions — Who Is Still Protected

(a) Applications filed by 27 March 2025: Those who had submitted a formal administrative or judicial application for citizenship recognition – or had a confirmed consular appointment – by 23:59 Rome time on 27 March 2025 retain their rights under the old rules.

(b) Exclusive Italian citizenship in the direct line: Those who have, or had at the time of death, a parent or grandparent who has only ever held Italian citizenship (i.e., no other nationality) are exempt from the new restrictions.

(c) Parental residence in Italy: Those whose parent or adoptive parent resided continuously in Italy for at least two years after acquiring Italian citizenship and before the applicant’s birth or adoption are also exempt.

There are some additional transitional provisions for minor children.

For the vast majority of people who had not yet formalised their claim by the deadline – particularly those whose Italian ancestry dates back many generations and whose Italian-born ancestor also held foreign citizenship – the new law effectively extinguishes their path to recognition.

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The Case Before the Court

The case was brought to the Constitutional Court by the Turin Civil Court (specialised immigration section), which had been approached by eight Venezuelan citizens seeking recognition of their Italian citizenship. They were descendants of a man born in Turin in 1837 who had later emigrated to Venezuela and died there without having acquired Venezuelan nationality. Under the pre-2025 rules, their claim would almost certainly have succeeded – indeed, other descendants of the same ancestor had already obtained recognition from a Rome court in 2023.

The problem was that their court application was filed on 28 March 2025 – one day after the new decree came into force – and none of them met the exceptions in Article 3-bis. The Turin court suspended the proceedings and referred constitutional questions to the Constitutional Court, arguing that the retroactive cut-off was unlawful.

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The Grounds of Challenge

The Turin court raised four main lines of constitutional attack against Article 3-bis:

1. Equality and legal certainty (Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution): The retroactive cut-off was arbitrary, distinguishing without logical justification between those who had filed by one minute before midnight on 27 March 2025 and those who filed the next morning. It also violated the principle of legitimate expectations and legal certainty, since Italian law had recognised citizenship by descent for over 160 years and thousands of court decisions had confirmed this right.

2. EU law — citizenship of the Union (Article 117 Constitution, Articles 9 TEU and 20 TFEU): Because Italian citizenship automatically confers EU citizenship, the stripping of Italian citizenship also has the effect of withdrawing EU citizenship. EU Court of Justice case law requires that any loss of EU citizenship be subject to a proportionality assessment and that affected persons have a reasonable period to assert their rights. The decree provided no such safeguard.

3. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 117 Constitution, Article 15(2) UDHR): The 1948 Universal Declaration prohibits arbitrary deprivation of citizenship. The retroactive, automatic cut-off was argued to be exactly that.

4. ECHR Protocol 4 (Article 117 Constitution, Article 3(2) Protocol 4 ECHR): The fourth protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights provides that no one may be denied the right to enter the territory of the state of which they are a national. By stripping citizenship retroactively, the law was also said to deprive affected persons of this right.

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The Court’s Decision

In Judgment No. 63/2026, handed down on 11 March 2026 and published on 6 May 2026, the Constitutional Court rejected all of the challenges, some on the merits, others as inadmissible.

Articles 2 & 3 (retroactivity & legitimate expectation) — Rejected on the merits. The Court held that the law does not revoke acquired citizenship — it prevents citizenship from having arisen in the first place. Since no one in this category had a formally recognised status before the cut-off, there was no “consolidated” position to protect. The public interest in restoring a genuine link (vincoli effettivi) between citizenship and the Italian nation was held to outweigh the disappointment of those whose status had never been formalised. The legislature’s decision to apply the reform retrospectively was found to be constitutionally justified.

Articles 9 TEU / 20 TFEU (EU citizenship) — Rejected on the merits. The Court distinguished the EU Court of Justice case-law on which the Turin court relied. That case-law applies where a formally recognised citizen loses a status they have actually exercised. Here, the claimants had never been officially recognised as Italian (or EU) citizens and had never exercised those rights. The EU proportionality rules were therefore not triggered.

Article 15(2) UDHR (arbitrary deprivation of citizenship) — Inadmissible. The Court ruled this ground inadmissible because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a binding international treaty. The referring court had not explained how it could activate the constitutional obligation at Article 117(1) of the Constitution, which requires Italian legislation to comply with Italy’s international treaty obligations.

Article 3(2) Protocol 4 ECHR (right to enter one’s own country) — Inadmissible. The Court found this challenge inadmissible because Protocol 4 guarantees the right to enter the territory of one’s country — it does not guarantee the right to have or retain citizenship in the first place. The referring court had not properly argued the link between this provision and the impugned law.

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The Court’s Reasoning — The “Genuine Link” Principle

The Court’s decision goes well beyond procedure. It offers a substantive constitutional theory of Italian citizenship that practitioners and claimants should understand.

The Court draws a direct line between the principle of popular sovereignty in Article 1 of the Constitution and the content of citizenship. In a democratic republic, citizens are not merely subjects of law — they are members of a political community of shared destiny, bound by mutual rights and duties, solidarity, and a common cultural foundation. Citizenship therefore cannot be a purely formal legal category: it must reflect a real, effective connection to that community.

The pre-2025 regime, in the Court’s view, had drifted far from this constitutional model. Unlimited transmission of citizenship by descent across unlimited generations had created — by the Court’s estimate — some 60 million potential Italian citizens worldwide, the vast majority of whom had no meaningful tie to Italy. This was described as a unique anomaly in comparative European law: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain all impose generational or other limits on citizenship by descent. The Court also noted the growing impact on Italian electoral democracy, including risks to the validity of referendum quorums.

In short, the Court validated the legislature’s core policy choice: that citizenship must reflect a real connection, not merely an unbroken paper chain of descent.

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What the Court Did Not Decide — Potential Grounds for Future Challenge

The ruling is significant, but its scope is carefully bounded. Several potentially important legal questions were not addressed, either because they were not raised by the Turin court or because procedural constraints prevented the Court from reaching them. These represent possible avenues for future litigation.

Article 22 of the Constitution. The only provision in the Italian Constitution that expressly addresses citizenship prohibits its removal for political reasons. The Court did not engage with this provision because it was not raised. Whether the reform might be challenged under Article 22 remains open.

The appointment exception (Article 3-bis(a-bis)). The Court expressly noted — but declined to decide — whether it is constitutional to distinguish between those who received a consular appointment by the deadline and those who had initiated the recognition process but had not yet received an appointment by 23:59 on 27 March 2025. This was explicitly flagged as unresolved.

Article 8 ECHR — Right to Private and Family Life. The Strasbourg Court has held that Article 8 ECHR can be engaged by deprivation of citizenship where it has a concrete and disproportionate impact on the individual’s private or family life. This argument was not raised in the Turin proceedings. Cases where claimants can demonstrate real, concrete ties to Italy — family connections, property, cultural attachment — may be better placed to invoke this ground, whether before Italian courts or ultimately before the European Court of Human Rights.

ECHR Article 14 / Protocol 12 — Non-Discrimination. A challenge based on discrimination was not before the Court. The interaction between national descent criteria and prohibitions on nationality-based discrimination may warrant further exploration, particularly for claimants with demonstrable individual ties to Italy.

CJEU Reference — Proportionality of EU Citizenship Loss. The Constitutional Court distinguished the EU law challenge on the basis that the claimants had never formally held EU citizenship. But this reasoning may not hold in all cases. Where a claimant had already obtained administrative or judicial recognition, or where the claimant has exercised EU rights in reliance on a reasonable expectation of Italian citizenship, an EU law proportionality challenge may be better grounded. A preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the EU remains a potential route.

Children’s Rights. The decree already carved out some protection for minors. The full scope of this protection, and whether it covers all scenarios involving affected children, has not been comprehensively tested.

Individual Proportionality Assessment. EU Court of Justice case-law (Tjebbes, Udlændinge) requires States to conduct an individual proportionality assessment before depriving a person of citizenship in a way that also removes EU citizenship. The Constitutional Court confined this analysis to formally recognised citizens. Cases involving individuals with strong connections to Italy and the EU may still have room to invoke these requirements.

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What This Means for You

If you had already filed a formal administrative or judicial application for Italian citizenship recognition — or had a confirmed consular appointment — by 23:59 Rome time on 27 March 2025, your claim continues to be assessed under the old, more favourable rules. This ruling does not affect you.

If you had not yet filed by that deadline, the situation is more complex. The main routes under the new law are now: proving that a parent or grandparent held only Italian citizenship (with no other nationality), or proving that a parent or adoptive parent lived in Italy for at least two continuous years after acquiring citizenship and before your birth. Many people will not meet either criterion.

However, the ruling does not foreclose all legal avenues. The Constitutional Court’s judgment was decided on the specific grounds raised before it, and — as detailed above — a number of potentially significant legal arguments remain untested. Individual circumstances vary widely, and the strength of any challenge depends heavily on the specific facts of each case.

This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Italian citizenship law is complex and fact-specific. If you have a pending or potential citizenship claim, you should seek professional legal advice tailored to your individual circumstances.