Italian Justice Questions Reform That Nullifies Citizenship From Birth

The Corte Costituzionale italiana has been called upon once again to decide whether the 2025 citizenship reform can declare "never acquired" a nationality that, according to the rules in effect before the change, had already been consolidated from the birth of the person in question. The new constitutional legitimacy question was raised regarding article 3-bis of Lei nº 91/1992, amended by the so-called Decreto Tajani, and reaches the Court at a moment of significant legal instability on the subject in Italian citizenship.

What Is Under Judgment

The case under analysis questions whether article 3-bis of Lei nº 91/1992, as reworded by the 2025 reform, violates articles 2, 3, and 22 of the Italian Constitution — provisions that deal, respectively, with inviolable rights of the person, the principle of equality, and protection against the deprivation of legal capacity and citizenship for political reasons.

The central question submitted to the Corte Costituzionale is direct: can a later law declare "never existed" a citizenship that, according to the rules in effect at the time of the person's birth, had already been automatically acquired by the criterion of jus sanguinis? In other words, the question is whether the Italian State can retroactively go back to a person's very birth to erase a right that they carried throughout their life, even before any formal recognition.

This point is at the heart of the controversy. It is not about discussing whether administrative or judicial processes underway should follow the old law or the new one — that protection is already provided for in the reform text itself for applications filed before its entry into force. What is at stake is something more profound: whether citizenship, once acquired at birth according to the legislation of the time, can be retroactively emptied by a later rule, as if it had never existed.

Context of the 2025 Reform

The reform promoted by the Decreto Tajani, converted into law in 2025, significantly restricted the scope of Italian citizenship recognition by descent, limiting automatic transmission to children and grandchildren of Italians and changing the consular and administrative route available for more distant generations. Since then, the subject has generated a succession of challenges before different instances of Italian Justice, both at the national and European levels.

Italian courts are already awaiting a decision from European Justice in Luxembourg on lawsuits directly affected by the changes brought about by the reform. This process, however, mainly discusses the compatibility of the new law with principles of freedom of movement and non-discrimination within the European Union.

The case now brought to the Corte Costituzionale presents a distinct angle and, according to experts following the subject, potentially more decisive for thousands of descendants: the retroactive effect of the reform on citizenships that had already been acquired at birth, according to the previous rules. While the Luxembourg discussion tends to focus on aspects of European law, the Constitutional Court's analysis enters directly into the core of Italian law — whether it is constitutionally admissible for a new law to erase, with retroactive effect, a legal status consolidated in the past.

To follow the developments of this and other cases related to the subject, the portal maintains continuous coverage in the Italy news section.

Why It Matters for Brazilian Descendants

The community of Italian descendants in Brazil is among those most impacted by the 2025 reform, given the historical volume of Italian immigration to the country and the significant number of families with a right, at least in theory, to citizenship recognition by descent.

Many of these descendants obtained — or seek to obtain — recognition of citizenship based on the right in effect before the reform, when there was no generation limit for the transmission of nationality by jus sanguinis. A decision by the Corte Costituzionale favorable to the thesis that the new law cannot retroactively deny a right acquired at birth could have a direct impact on lawsuits and administrative processes still underway, both in Italy and those proceeding with the help of lawyers working in Brazil.

On the other hand, if the Court validates the understanding that the reform can, indeed, retroactively redefine who has always had — or never had — a right to citizenship, legal uncertainty for those who have not yet obtained recognition tends to deepen. It is a scenario that directly interests those who plan not only to regularize documents but also possibly to build a life in Italy based on a European passport.

The subject remains without a set date for judgment, but the mere admission of the question before the Corte Costituzionale is already seen as a sign that the debate about the limits of the reform is far from over. Descendants who have cases underway or who are still evaluating initiating a recognition request should closely follow the next chapters of this dispute, which becomes part of the already complex legal framework involving Italian citizenship in Brazil.

As a conclusion, the case reinforces that the 2025 reform still faces multiple fronts of contestation — in Italian Justice, European Justice, and now also on the constitutional level — and that the outcome of these disputes should shape, in the coming years, the real scope of the right to citizenship by descent for millions of Italian descendants around the world.

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Source: Insieme