Italy’s Constitutional Court upheld a highly controversial 2025 law on Thursday that severely restricts citizenship for individuals born abroad. The ruling cements the March 28, 2025 emergency decree, dictating that only individuals with a parent or grandparent born in Italy can now be recognized as citizens.
The decision effectively outlaws dual citizenship for descent claims. Under the upheld law, the qualifying parent or grandparent must have held solely Italian citizenship at the time of the descendant’s birth or at their own death. The government’s legal counsel successfully argued that descendants who had not officially claimed their citizenship by the 2025 cutoff possessed only a fictitious link to the country and had therefore lost the right to it.
The ruling alters 160 years of legal tradition. Since Italy’s unification in 1861, the nation operated under a broad interpretation of jus sanguinis, allowing citizenship to be passed down indefinitely across multiple generations as long as the genealogical line was never broken. The government introduced the strict generational limits via Law 74/2025 to combat passport shopping and relieve overwhelmed consular systems.
Driven by remote-work trends and tax incentives, demand for Italian passports exploded after 2022. This surge created an estimated backlog of 360,000 files and forced consular waitlists to stretch up to 10 years across the world.
Lower courts in Turin, Mantua, and Campobasso previously referred the law to the Constitutional Court. They argued that retroactively applying these limits to foreign-born individuals born prior to 2025 violated Article 3 of the Italian Constitution and stripped them of inherent birthrights without transitional protections. The Constitutional Court declared the constitutional legitimacy questions partially unfounded and partially inadmissible, leaving the generational limit in immediate effect.
The verdict impacts an estimated eight million people in the Italian diaspora, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, who were mid-process or awaiting appointments. Legal experts indicate that while domestic challenges have been defeated, future legal battles against the restrictions may be escalated to European Union courts in Luxembourg.