For millions of people across Brazil, Argentina, the United States, and beyond, the dream of claiming Italian citizenship through ancestry has turned into a legal rollercoaster over the past year and a half. What began as a sweeping reform designed to tighten eligibility has evolved into one of the most closely watched legal sagas in modern Italian jurisprudence. Now, a fresh development out of Rome has reignited optimism among applicants who feared their claims had been permanently shut out.
On July 23, 2026, Italy’s Constitutional Court took a step that few expected after months of rulings that seemed to favor the government’s restrictive approach. Rather than closing the door entirely, the Court paused its own proceedings and sent a pivotal question to the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg, a move that many lawyers are calling the most meaningful lifeline the diaspora has received since the reform began.
The Origins of the Crisis: The Tajani Decree
The trouble started in March 2025, when the Italian government issued Decree-Law 36/2025, which announced major changes in citizenship by descent law, limiting eligibility to those with an Italian parent or grandparent, as opposed to the previous law which granted citizenship to any person who could prove an unbroken chain of Italian descent back to any ancestor born after Italy became a nation in 1861. Just weeks later, on May 23, 2025, this decree was officially converted into law, becoming Law 74/2025.
The new framework was strict by any measure. Under the converted law, it deemed anyone born abroad who holds another citizenship to have never acquired Italian citizenship, not revoked, not withdrawn. In the eyes of Italian law, these individuals were never citizens at all. This legal fiction applied with almost no regard for how long a family had been separated from Italy, and it left countless applicants who had spent years and considerable money on genealogical research suddenly locked out.
A Cutoff Date That Split Families Apart
Perhaps the most controversial element of the reform was its rigid timing. The law created strict conditions, such as requiring an ancestor to possess exclusively Italian citizenship or mandating a two-year residency in Italy, while establishing a rigid cut-off date for pending applications on March 27, 2025. Anyone who had not filed by 11:59 p.m. Rome time that night found themselves subject to entirely different, far tougher rules than those who filed just hours earlier.
According to reporting cited by legal analysts, roughly 60,000 applicants who filed before the 27 March 2025 cutoff continue under the old unlimited-generation rules, while everyone else must meet the new criteria or wait for the remaining legal challenges to play out. The scale of the population affected is staggering. Estimates suggest for the estimated 80 million people worldwide who claim Italian descent, the ruling narrows the picture considerably, with the largest affected populations found in Brazil, an estimated 32 million people of Italian descent, Argentina with 25 million, and the United States.
The Constitutional Court’s First Verdict Disappoints Many
Hopes for a quick reversal were pinned on the Italian Constitutional Court, which took up a challenge referred by the Tribunal of Turin. That court had raised serious doubts, questioning whether the retroactive reach of the new provision violated constitutional principles such as equality, reasonableness, legal certainty, and Italy’s international obligations.
The answer came on March 12, 2026, and it was not what advocates had hoped for. Italy’s Constitutional Court upheld the 2025 law restricting citizenship by descent, rejecting constitutional challenges and leaving in place a reform that sharply narrowed the traditional jus sanguinis principle, in a decision that came in a statement from the court after judges ruled on a constitutional challenge filed by a court in Turin. The full written judgment followed weeks later. On April 30, 2026, the Italian Constitutional Court published Sentence No. 63/2026, a highly anticipated decision regarding the constitutional legitimacy of the reform.
Reading Between the Lines of Judgment 63/2026
Even though the ruling upheld the government’s framework, careful readers of the judgment noticed it was far from a total defeat for applicants. As one legal analysis put it, Judgment No. 63/2026 did not abolish jure sanguinis. It confirmed that the legislature has broad discretion to limit Italian citizenship by descent, but the ruling did not eliminate all routes to Italian citizenship through Italian ancestors.
Some of the Court’s own language hinted at unresolved tension. The judgment described applicants awaiting recognition using unusually cautious terms, with the preamble of Decree-Law No. 36/2025 describing descendants jure sanguinis as potential Italian citizens, a framework the Court adopted when it reasoned that the status of unrecognized descendants is not yet certain and that no rights are concretely exercisable before formal recognition. That framing would later become central to the next chapter of the saga.
The Cassation Court Pushes Back
Just weeks after the Constitutional Court’s judgment was deposited, Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation issued a ruling that seemed to directly contradict the tone set in Rome. Filed on May 12, 2026, the Cassation’s decision expressly reaffirmed that Italian citizenship transmitted by descent constitutes an absolute subjective right of primary constitutional relevance, existing from the moment of the holder’s birth, possessing a permanent and imprescriptible nature.
Legal commentators immediately noted the friction this created. The wording stood out because it came only a few months after Constitutional Court Judgment 63/2026, in which references appeared describing iure sanguinis citizenship as a precarious situation until formal recognition. In a separate but related ruling, the Cassation also sided with applicants who had been blocked by administrative bottlenecks, holding that citizenship jure sanguinis is a right that the state cannot strip away from an individual, and when an application is granted citizenship, it is considered to be the recognition of a preexisting status.
