The courts in 2025 and 2026

The reform of 2025 reached the Constitutional Court within three months of its publication, and the Court has spoken twice: a judgment in April 2026 which upheld it, and an order in July 2026 which asked the Court of Justice of the European Union whether Union law allows it. In the same weeks the United Sections of the Court of Cassation settled the question which had closed thousands of files since 2024, the so-called minor issue. This page sets out each decision, what it decided and what it left open, and what follows for a family which applies today.

Judgment 142 of 31 July 2025

Before the reform, the courts of Bologna, Rome, Milan and Florence had asked the Constitutional Court whether article 1 of Law 91/1992, which transmitted citizenship by descent without any limit of generations or of effective link, was compatible with the Constitution. The Court answered on 31 July 2025 that the questions were in part inadmissible and for the rest unfounded. The choice of the criteria for acquiring citizenship belongs to Parliament, whose discretion in this field is particularly wide, and a judgment which rewrote the rule would have obliged the Court to choose among too many options with systemic consequences. The decree-law of March 2025, which had intervened in the meantime, did not apply to those cases, and the Court declined to rule on it. The judgment matters because it states the principle of the effective link on which the later decisions rely.

Judgment 63 of 30 April 2026

The court of Turin, in June 2025, referred the new article 3-bis to the Constitutional Court in a case brought by eight Venezuelan descendants of an ancestor born in Turin in 1837, whose claim had been filed on 28 March 2025, one day after the cut-off. The Court, in a judgment decided on 11 March and deposited on 30 April 2026, found the questions unfounded. Its reasoning has three parts. Article 3-bis is retroactive, but it does not revoke a citizenship: for a person born abroad whose status was never recognised, the status was never certain, and the rule creates an original bar to the acquisition, not a loss. The retroactivity is justified by the principle of an effective link between the citizen and the Republic, drawn from judgment 142/2025, from the European Convention on Nationality and from the case law of the Court of Justice on the loss of citizenship: with more than four million citizens born and resident abroad in 2024, a rule limited to future births would have changed nothing. The reliance of those affected is protected by the exceptions for applications and claims lodged by 27 March 2025, and the reform was not unforeseeable after the signals of 2024. The Court also listed the compensating measures: the declaration for minor children of citizens by birth, the transitional window, the entry for work of the descendants of emigrants and the naturalisation after two years of residence.

On Union law, the Court held that the case law of the Court of Justice on the individual examination of proportionality concerns the deprivation of a status already established, and is not relevant to a bar on acquisition, so that no referral was needed. It left expressly open the position of a person who had started the procedure without obtaining an appointment by 27 March 2025, because the question had not been raised.

Order 147 of 23 July 2026 and the referral to Luxembourg

Three months later the Court changed method, if not opinion. The courts of Mantua and Campobasso had referred article 3-bis again, in the case of a Brazilian minor whose mother had been recognised by the court of Brescia in April 2025 and whose birth the comune refused to transcribe, and in the cases of four Argentine and Brazilian descendants of emigrants who never naturalised, with claims filed in May and August 2025. The Court, in an order decided on 9 June and deposited on 23 July 2026, repeated the reading of judgment 63 and then, in the name of loyal cooperation with the Union and of the exclusive competence of the Court of Justice on the interpretation of Union law, referred to Luxembourg the question whether articles 9 of the Treaty on European Union and 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union preclude a rule which bars the acquisition of citizenship for persons born abroad before its entry into force who hold another citizenship, outside the conditions the rule provides. The constitutional proceedings are suspended. The case was registered by the Court of Justice on 23 July 2026 as C-816/26.

The order refused to return the cases to the referring courts after the order of the Court of Cassation of 12 May 2026, refused to wait for the United Sections, and did not examine the condition of the appointment never received nor the condition of exclusive citizenship, because they were not before it. The rule remains in force while Luxembourg decides, and the lower courts have begun to adjourn the cases which depend on the answer: Catanzaro to June 2027, Avellino with new referrals in September 2026.

The United Sections, judgment 24045 of 26 July 2026

The Court of Cassation had held, from 2011 and with greater force in 2023 and 2024, that a child born abroad to an Italian father who naturalised while the child was a minor and lived with him lost Italian citizenship with the father under article 12 of the law of 1912, even where the child held the citizenship of the country of birth. The Ministry of the Interior turned that reading into an instruction to the consulates and the comuni with circular 43347 of 3 October 2024, and the refusals which followed, in London as elsewhere, are known as the minor issue. The United Sections, in a judgment heard on 14 April and deposited on 26 July 2026, reversed that line. A child born abroad to an Italian parent in a country which gives citizenship by birth on its soil holds both citizenships from birth, and the naturalisation of the parent does not take the Italian one away, because article 12 of the law of 1912 reached only the minor who held exclusively Italian citizenship and who acquired the foreign citizenship with the parent. The equality of mother and father applies to the effects of the loss as to the acquisition. The judgment also holds that article 3-bis does not apply to the court claims filed before 27 March 2025, which remain governed by the earlier law.

For the United Kingdom the judgment concerns every family whose ancestor naturalised as a British subject while the next person in the line was a minor born in Britain before 1983, when birth in the country gave British citizenship. Those lines are intact. The Ministry of the Interior, with circular 65050 of 10 August 2026, opened the re-examination of the refusals based on the minor issue, within the conditions of article 3-bis: a file refused on that ground after an application lodged by 27 March 2025 is re-examined under the earlier law, and a file never lodged is examined under the conditions of the reform.

What it means for a file today

• An application lodged with a consulate or a comune, or a claim filed with a court, by 23:59 Rome time on 27 March 2025, or an appointment communicated by then, is examined under the law before the reform. Both the Constitutional Court and the United Sections treat these positions as protected.
• A person who did nothing before that date is examined under article 3-bis: a parent or grandparent who held exclusively Italian citizenship, or a parent who lived in Italy for two years before the birth. The rule applies whatever the outcome in Luxembourg may later be, and nothing in the referral suspends it.
• A refusal based on the minor issue is reviewed on request, and a line which was thought broken by a naturalisation during the minority of a child born in Britain before 1983 is intact.
• The maternal lines before 1948 remain a matter for the courts, and a claim filed after 27 March 2025 meets the conditions of article 3-bis there too.
• The question pending in Luxembourg concerns the retroactivity of the bar. A decision in favour of the applicants would reopen the position of the descendants born before the reform, and a decision against would close it. Nobody can say today which, or when. A family which has a route open under the law as it stands should use it, and a family which has none can only wait, prepare the documents, and consider the two-year residence.

We do not act in court, and we say so. What we do is read the decisions as they come, apply them to the files we prepare, and tell each family which of the positions above is theirs before a single certificate is requested.