On March 12, 2026, Italy’s Constitutional Court released a short press statement rejecting the constitutional challenge brought by the Court of Turin against Italy’s 2025 citizenship reforms. The questions were “in part inadmissible and in part unfounded,” the Court said. The reform stands.
But this decision resolves less than it might seem to. While this was the first constitutional test of Italy’s new 2025 citizenship by descent reform, it is far from the last. Another hearing scheduled for later this year challenges the 2025 reform under a broader constitutional context. Let’s analyze.
What Turin Was Arguing
The Turin case targeted Article 3-bis of Italy’s nationality law, which was introduced through Decree-Law No. 36 of March 28, 2025, and converted into Law No. 74 of May 23, 2025. This was the most significant rewrite of Italian citizenship law in a generation.
For over a century, Italy allowed people born abroad to claim citizenship through an unbroken line of Italian descent, with no generational limit. The 2025 reform changed that, introducing new restrictions that hit hardest on people born outside Italy who already hold another citizenship. It also drew a hard cutoff date: requests filed before March 27, 2025 could proceed under the old rules. Everything filed after fell under the new citizenship criteria.
Turin’s judges argued this was unconstitutional on several grounds. The cutoff created an unequal distinction between otherwise similarly situated descendants based purely on timing. The reform also effectively stripped citizenship from people who would have qualified under the prior law but hadn’t yet formalized their recognition. The referral also raised European Union law, arguing that since EU citizenship flows from member state nationality, the restrictions might bump up against EU treaty provisions.
Italy’s Constitutional Court wasn’t persuaded. It rejected the equality and EU arguments as unfounded and dismissed the international human rights arguments as inadmissible.
Why This Challenge Was Always Uphill
Constitutional courts are generally reluctant to strike down legislation just because it draws a line in the sand. Cutoff dates are everywhere in law. The critical question is what the Court thought the reform was actually doing.
If the Court read the 2025 changes as a reform to the administrative process for recognizing citizenship, rather than as the state taking away citizenship people already held, then Turin’s arguments don’t have much traction. That appears to be how the Court read it.
The EU argument faced a similar structural problem. EU citizenship derives from member state nationality, but EU law doesn’t tell member states who gets to be a national in the first place. That’s each country’s call, and Italy exercised it.
The Mantua Case Is Still Coming
A separate challenge from the Court of Mantua is still pending before the Constitutional Court, and it’s worth watching more closely.
Where Turin focused on equality and retroactivity, Mantua appears to be asking bigger questions about the nature of citizenship itself. The reported issues include the protection of fundamental rights under Article 2 of the Italian Constitution, the prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of citizenship under Article 22, and the limits on the government’s use of emergency decree-laws under Article 77.
Many of these questions have a broader framing than the Turin case. Courts tend to defer to legislatures on procedural and administrative questions.
Given the Constitutional Court’s current ruling, the biggest constitutional question which will have gone wholly untested during the next hearing is whether the Italian government could consider the citizenship situation in Italy a true emergency necessitating a decree law instead of following the normal democratic process.
Meanwhile, the Reform Landscape Keeps Shifting
The Turin litigation is playing out against a backdrop of continued legislative change. Two additional reforms have already taken effect in 2026.
Through Law No. 26 of February 28, 2026, Italy extended the deadline for certain minor children to acquire citizenship under a transitional provision from the 2025 reform. The original deadline was May 31, 2026. It’s now May 31, 2029. The extension applies to children who were still minors when the reform took effect on May 24, 2025, and whose parents are Italian citizens by birth falling within the transitional categories. This doesn’t reopen the old system. It just buys more time for families who were caught mid-process.
The second reform, Law No. 11 of January 19, 2026, creates a new centralized office within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that will eventually take over the processing of citizenship recognition applications filed from abroad. This is a direct response to the consulate backlog problem that became particularly severe in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States over the past decade. The new office goes live on January 1, 2029. Until then, consulates continue processing applications but now operate under annual intake limits. Once the central office opens, it will also have intake caps and a statutory processing window of up to 36 months.
The direction is clear: Italy is moving toward a tighter, more centralized system with predictable ceilings on intake and processing time.
Moving Forward
The main takeaway from the recent Constitutional Court case is that Italy’s 2025 citizenship reforms are constitutional, at least for now. The court’s press release offers some insight into its reasoning, but a full written opinion won’t be published for several more months. A second Constitutional Court hearing is scheduled for June 2026, challenging the law on broader grounds. Based on early signals, the most untested question will be whether an emergency decree was a constitutionally appropriate vehicle for the reform. Even if the court finds that argument has merit, it would be a procedural issue rather than a substantive one.
In our view, this means the current eligibility criteria should be considered fully in effect. As of March 2026, three groups of people remain eligible for Italian citizenship by descent:
- Those who began a case before March 28, 2025, either by obtaining a consular matriculation number by that date or by filing an active court case in Italy’s judicial system by the same date.
- Those with a parent or grandparent, living or deceased, who holds or held only Italian citizenship.
- Those whose parents resided in Italy as citizens for at least two years before the child’s birth.
It is worth noting that if you have documented proof of attempting to apply before March 2025 — such as emails or correspondence with Italian consulates abroad — your options may be worth exploring. Italian courts are currently considering cases from applicants who can show they tried to apply and received no response from the authorities. Those cases are still working their way through the system.
Relevant sources and official texts:
- Law No. 91 of February 5, 1992 (base nationality law)
- Decree-Law No. 36 of March 28, 2025 (original reform decree)
- Law No. 74 of May 23, 2025 (conversion law)
- Law No. 11 of January 19, 2026 (centralization reform)
- Law No. 26 of February 28, 2026 (minor registration extension)
- Announcement from Italy’s Constitutional Court (Corte Costituzionale)
- Italy’s Constitutional Court (Corte Costituzionale)
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