In the last week of July 2026, before the Italian courts closed for the summer, the question of Italian citizenship by descent reached the Court of Justice of the European Union. Two decisions landed within three days, and neither of them changed the law. The reform applies exactly as it did the week before.
What the two decisions did change is the strength of the arguments available to anyone still deciding whether to file. One sent the 2025 reform to Luxembourg. The other closed a century-old dispute that had blocked thousands of citizenship by descent files at the consulates.
This article explains what each decision says, what it does not say, and what it means in practice for a petition filed today.
Let’s get to it!
Where This Begins
Two Italian tribunals questioned whether the 2025 reform can survive European law.
In the early months of 2026 two Italian courts, the Tribunal of Mantua and the Tribunal of Campobasso, raised questions on the constitutional legitimacy of the 2025 citizenship reform. Among the grounds they raised, one is the reason we are writing today: the conflict between the Italian reform and the principles laid down by the European Union courts.
It is worth remembering what stands behind that argument. When a person becomes an Italian citizen (or a citizen of any European Union Member State), that person becomes above all a Citizen of the European Union. Italy is therefore not free to design its citizenship rules against its own Constitution alone. It must design them in line with a higher legal order, the order of the European Union, which binds every Member State.
Citizenship is the one area where a national decision produces an immediately European effect, because the passport that Italy grants or refuses is also the key to free movement, work and residence across twenty-seven countries.
The Tribunal of Mantua and the Tribunal of Campobasso took the view that with the 2025 reform Italy breached that principle. The Court of Justice of the European Union has held, in a line of cases running from the Netherlands to Denmark, that a Member State may require a real connection with the country, but that it may not deprive a person of citizenship, or of the possibility of establishing it, without proper process and without an individual assessment of that person’s own connection with the country, its territory and its traditions.
The 2025 reform provides for neither. It operated, in a single day, like a guillotine: two generations, and no further. It took no account of the millions of people who for years had relied in good faith on rules they had every reason to believe were not retroactive, who had spent time and money gathering records, and who were still waiting for a consular appointment that never came.
Italian Citizenship At The Court Of Justice: What The Corte Costituzionale Has Asked
On 23 July 2026 the Court suspended its own proceedings and sent the question to Luxembourg.
With Order No. 147/2026, the Italian Constitutional Court (Corte Costituzionale) suspended those proceedings and referred a question to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The question, put simply, is whether the European Treaty provisions on European citizenship allow a rule of the kind introduced in Italy by Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992: a rule which retroactively blocks the acquisition of Italian citizenship from the very beginning for a person born abroad who holds another citizenship, including a person born long before the reform came into force, unless one of the narrow exceptions in the law applies.
This rule applies, brutally and unfairly, to any case submitted after 27 March 2025. It does not matter that when you were born (and therefore automatically acquired the status of Italian citizen) the law set no generational limits. It does not matter that you started collecting your documents long before the new law entered into force. And it does not matter that you tried for years to book an appointment on the website of the Italian consulate in order to file your application. The new law, with a guillotine effect, applies to any application filed after 27 March 2025.
This is the flaw that the referral may resolve: whether the new rules on citizenship set by the Italian Parliament comply with the EU rules that require checking, case by case, whether the applicant has and maintains a real and true connection and link with the Member State.
The referral matters as much for the fact of it as for its wording.
In April 2026, so just three months earlier, with Judgment No. 63/2026, the Corte Costituzionale held that the 2025 reform did not need to be referred to Luxembourg, because the point was clear enough to be settled in Rome. On 23 July 2026 it did the opposite: some aspects of the law need an answer from the European judges, to be sure that the new Italian rules on citizenship do not violate the higher rules set by the European Union.
Nothing in the law had changed in the meantime. A court refers a question only when it does not consider the answer settled, and by referring this one the Corte Costituzionale has accepted that a problem may exist after all, and that whether the Italian reform can stand against European law is now genuinely open.
| Date | What Happened | Effect On Cases |
|---|---|---|
| 27 March 2025 | The citizenship reform enters into force, introducing Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992 | The two-generation limit applies to every application filed from this date onwards |
| Early 2026 | The Tribunal of Mantua and the Tribunal of Campobasso raise questions of constitutional legitimacy | The reform is challenged, including on European law grounds |
| April 2026 | Judgment No. 63/2026 upholds the reform and declines to refer the question to Luxembourg | The reform stands, and one door is left open at point 9.1 |
| 23 July 2026 | Order No. 147/2026 refers the question to the Court of Justice of the European Union | Three constitutional proceedings are suspended, the reform continues to apply everywhere else |
| 26 July 2026 | The Sezioni Unite settle the “minor issue” | Refusals based on the minor issue alone are contradicted by the highest civil authority |
Please note what the Order does not do.
It does not declare the reform unconstitutional, it does not suspend the law, and it does not freeze citizenship cases across Italy. It suspends the three proceedings that were before the Corte Costituzionale. Consulates and Italian town halls continue to apply the reform exactly as before, and if you have read anywhere that citizenship by descent is “back”, that is not correct.
What changes is the position of the Italian judge who will hear your case. That judge shall apply not only Italian law but also the principles of European law, and where the two conflict, European law prevails. Each Italian judge may therefore decline to apply Article 3-bis and decide your case under the rules as they stood before 2025.
We have been making this argument since our first petitions after the reform. After 23 July it is considerably stronger, because the highest court in the Italian constitutional system has now put the very same doubt to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
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What It Means For Your Case If You File From Now On
An Italian citizenship case does not have to wait for the Court of Justice.
Luxembourg will take time. A reference of this kind normally requires twelve to eighteen months, and here it may well take longer, because other Member States and the European Commission will want to be heard on a question that touches every national citizenship law in the Union.
That period is not wasted time, and this is the point least understood in the discussion of the past week. An Italian judge hearing a citizenship case today is not obliged to wait for the European ruling. Where the judge is satisfied that Article 3-bis conflicts with European law, he can set it aside himself and decide the case under the rules in force before 2025, which carried no generational limit.
A petition filed today therefore has three possible paths.
| Path | What The Court Does | What It Means For You |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The rule is set aside | The court disapplies Article 3-bis and decides the case under the pre-2025 rules | Your case is decided without any generational limit |
| 2. The case is suspended | The court prefers to wait for the ruling from Luxembourg | Your petition is already on the docket and your documents are already filed. The case is suspended, not dismissed, and it resumes once the European ruling arrives |
| 3. The petition is rejected | The court applies the new provision | This is happening in courts across Italy, and it is the outcome we prepare for. A first-instance rejection can be appealed, and an appeal filed now will still be pending when the European ruling arrives |
The Door Left Open In April
Point 9.1 of the April decision may be your door.
The April decision of the Constitutional Court left one door open, at point 9.1 of the decision. In that decision, the Judges of the Constitutional Court decided “not to decide” an important situation: whether the person who had started the process and never received an appointment can be considered “in the system”, and therefore whether the old rules should be applied to them.
If your file went into a consular queue, watching a closed Prenot@mi calendar, and the appointment never arrived, that is you. If you never filed at all, your position is weaker. In this latter case, the Court held that years of collecting records, on their own, do not outweigh the reform, because recognition still had to be applied for.
The stronger argument there is the European one, and it is now in Luxembourg, and we include it in our defences. In any case, both arguments run through the petitions we file.
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The Sezioni Unite: Better News Than The Headlines Say
The Sezioni Unite have resolved the “minor issue”.
Three days after the referral, on 26 July, the Italian Court of Cassation sitting as the Sezioni Unite (Corte di Cassazione, Sezioni Unite, the formation that settles conflicts of interpretation) put an end to the dispute known as the “minor issue”, and a further ruling of 26 July confirmed it.
A child born abroad to an Italian parent, in a country that grants citizenship to everyone born on its soil, holds both citizenships from birth and keeps the Italian one even if the parent later naturalises in that country while the child is still a minor.
The same decision confirmed that the 2025 reform does not apply to court applications filed before 27 March 2025, which remain governed by the previous law.
Does this mean old documents can now be used to apply again?
It depends. The citizenship rules set in 2025 still apply, and that means that the Italian ancestor (born in Italy) must have remained exclusively Italian until after the birth of the applicant. Please note, the applicant, not the child. So the two-generation limit and the exclusivity requirement still apply.
But if a consulate refused your file on the ground of the “minor issue” alone, that refusal is now contradicted by the highest civil authority in the Italian system.
For those applying after the reform, the effect is narrower, because a claim resting on an ancestor who held Italian citizenship only will still fail if that ancestor naturalised before the applicant’s birth. But if the European judges determine that the Italian rules on citizenship do not reflect EU principles, and therefore that the old rules should apply, we will be able to proceed without the problem created by the “minor issue”.
Is It Worth Filing Now?
Every case is different, and no general answer works for everyone.
The reform stands. Consulates and town halls are applying it. Nothing came back automatically, and if you have read that citizenship by descent is “back”, that is wrong.
What is true is that the rules on Italian citizenship are now being examined by the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, and that in the meantime Italian judges can either freeze cases or set the rule aside. Whether your own file gains anything from all this depends on facts that cannot be checked in an article.
One practical suggestion for the coming weeks. On some afternoon too hot for anything else, open “that folder” again and check whether the Certification of Non-Existence of Record you meant to request from USCIS, or that marriage certificate of your great-grandparent, was in fact requested, or whether it is still a line on a list, and what came back from the National Archives. Those papers may be needed sooner than you think.
Know someone still deciding whether to file their citizenship case? Share this article with them. The clearer the picture, the better the decisions they can make.
This battle is far from over.
This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Please contact us for advice specific to your situation.
