Italian Citizenship Reform 2025: Court Ruling Insights

As we predicted, the 2025 Italian citizenship reform saga continues with a series of twists and, inevitably in our opinion, changes which are likely to soften the blow to thousands of Italian-descendants who have seen their path to Italian citizenship curtailed. In this article we cover a new Constitutional Court ruling that hints at important changes in how the new law will be applied.

July 2025 Court Ruling On Italian Citizenship

On 31 July 2025, the Italian Constitutional Court (Corte Costituzionale) has stepped into the heated debate over citizenship by descent (ius sanguinis) with a new ruling. In this ruling, the Court refused to impose new limits on Italy’s traditional policy of recognizing citizenship for descendants of Italians, even generations later. Multiple lower courts had challenged the unlimited ius sanguinis model, arguing that applicants with no real ties to Italy (never living in Italy, not speaking Italian, etc.) shouldn’t automatically be granted citizenship. The Constitutional Court, however, declared those challenges “inadmissible”, essentially saying it’s not the Court’s role to rewrite citizenship law – that job lies with Parliament. In other words, judges cannot unilaterally add requirements like language or residency; such big policy shifts must come from lawmakers.

In the 31 July 2025 ruling, the Court acknowledged there may be “distortions” in granting EU citizenship to potentially millions with tenuous links, but it insisted that choosing how to fix that is a political question with many options – not something a court can decide in one stroke. Importantly, the judges noted Parliament has wide latitude to reform citizenship criteria, so long as any new rules respect constitutional principles and are not “discriminatory”. In fact, the Court pointed out it will strike down any law using criteria “entirely alien” to constitutional values.

Restrictions Imposed by the 2025 Citizenship Reform

This brings us to the 2025 citizenship reform that Italy’s government pushed through earlier this year. That law (often dubbed the “Decreto della Vergogna” or “Decree of Shame” by critics) dramatically tightens ancestry-based citizenship. Under the new rules, your Italian ancestor must have held sole Italian citizenship (no dual citizenship), and if your parent obtained Italian citizenship by descent, they must have lived in Italy for at least 2 years before your birth. These conditions retroactively strip the right to Italian citizenship from many descendants – especially those whose forebears became dual citizens abroad or those born to parents who never relocated to Italy. Experts describe these changes as punitive and unprecedented, effectively penalizing families for an ancestor’s naturalization in another country. Given Italy only allowed dual citizenship freely since 1992, this restriction on ancestors’ dual citizenship is seen as particularly harsh (countless Italian emigrants had lost their citizenship by becoming Americans, Brazilians, etc., thus breaking the line for their descendants).

On the plus side, applications submitted before the May 2025 reform will carry on under the previous rules. However, the restrictions set in the May reform will apply until the Constitutional Court rules on the reform itself.

What Will The Court Rule On The 2025 Citizenship Reform?

So where do things go from here? Although the Constitutional Court didn’t directly rule on the new 2025 law (it wasn’t under review in the July case), it hinted at doubts about that law’s legitimacy. Professor Nicola Brutti from Padua University, part of the legal team defending expats’ rights, noted that the Court’s language implicitly questions the constitutionality of the new criteria. For instance, the Court emphasized that citizenship rules must align with pluralist, inclusive principles – highlighting that blanket rules causing people to lose status for having dual citizenship could be unconstitutional. The Court even referenced European Union law: EU treaties frown upon automatically depriving individuals of EU citizenship without an individual assessment of the impact. This suggests the most onerous parts of the reform (like retroactively denying citizenship to entire groups) might not survive scrutiny for proportionality and reasonableness.

Legal challenges are indeed on the horizon. A court in Turin has already referred the 2025 reform to the Constitutional Court, with a hearing set for February 2026. That will be the moment the Court can directly judge the new law. Based on the signals so far, many observers expect the justices to strike down or demand changes to provisions that violate fundamental rights or Italy’s international commitments. In the meantime, Italian diaspora communities around the world are mobilizing. Advocacy groups and jurists are prepared to take the fight to European courts if necessary. They argue that citizenship by descent is intertwined with basic rights – cultural identity, legal security, non-discrimination – protected under EU law and human rights conventions. Any sweeping, retroactive revocation of those rights (as attempted by the new rules) could be overturned at the European level.

For foreign residents and descendants of Italians, the key takeaway is this: Italy’s approach to citizenship by ancestry is in flux, but the Constitutional Court has reaffirmed that it won’t allow rash or unfair changes without proper legislative process and respect for higher principles. However, the battle over who qualifies as “Italian” is far from over. We will likely see a year of legal showdowns, and possibly an eventual reset of the 2025 restrictions. The hope among expat advocates is that reason (and constitutional values) will prevail, ensuring that Italy modernizes its citizenship laws without arbitrarily shutting out large swathes of its diaspora.