Italy’s Constitutional Court rejected constitutional challenges to Law 74/2025 on 12 March, upholding the generational cap on citizenship by descent (ius sanguinis) introduced last year via emergency decree.
The ruling, issued as a press communiqué pending the full written judgment (sentenza), declared questions raised by the Tribunal of Turin partly unfounded and partly inadmissible.
The law, commonly known as the Tajani Decree after Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, deems 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Not revoked, not withdrawn: In the eyes of Italian law, these individuals were never citizens at all. That legal fiction applies retroactively, regardless of birth date, unless one of three narrow exceptions is met:
- Citizenship was recognized (administratively or judicially) following an application filed by 11:59 p.m. Rome time on 27 March 2025
- A parent or grandparent holds, or held at the time of death, exclusively Italian citizenship
- A parent or adoptive parent resided in Italy for at least two consecutive years after acquiring Italian citizenship and before the applicant’s birth or adoption
For a family that has considered itself Italian for four generations, the distinction is not academic. A revocation implies something was taken; non-acquisition means, legally, there was nothing to take.
The exclusivity requirement in exception (b) carries a further consequence: an Italian who emigrates and naturalizes in another country no longer holds solely Italian citizenship, which means their children born abroad may not qualify. In practice, this makes dual citizenship consequential for transmission in a way it never was before.
Italy converted the emergency decree into law on 23 May 2025, formally ending the centuries-old principle that citizenship could pass down indefinitely through generations.
What the Court Found
The ruling draws a legally material distinction between claims rejected on substance and those the court declined to examine at all. That distinction shapes what comes next.
Declared unfounded (examined and rejected on the merits):
- The claim under Article 3 of the Italian Constitution that the 27 March 2025 cutoff arbitrarily distinguishes between earlier and later applicants, and that the law amounts to a retroactive revocation of acquired rights
- The claim under Article 9 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFUE), which grant EU citizenship to all member-state nationals
Declared inadmissible (not examined on the merits):
- The claim under Article 15(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, prohibiting arbitrary deprivation of citizenship
- The claim under Article 3(2) of Protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), protecting the right to enter one’s own country
The inadmissibility findings mean the court set those questions aside on procedural grounds without ruling on their substance, leaving them available for future domestic referrals or proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg or the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
On the EU treaty claim, however, Italy’s highest constitutional authority has now substantively ruled that restricting ius sanguinis does not violate EU citizenship provisions. Anyone seeking to challenge the law in Luxembourg will have to contend with that finding.
What Remains Open
Three legal fronts survive the 12 March ruling:
- Mantova referral.
A separate constitutional challenge to the same law, filed by the Tribunal of Mantova on different grounds from those raised in Turin, is scheduled for hearing on 9 June 2026. A different court, different arguments, and a fresh opportunity for the law to be tested. - Supreme Court (Sezioni Unite).
Italy’s highest civil court will hear the “minor-age issue” on 14 April 2026: whether an ancestor’s decision to naturalize in another country while their child was still a minor severed the bloodline for all subsequent generations. That question predates the Tajani Decree and could independently affect thousands of pending cases, because it governs which ancestral chains were valid in the first place, regardless of the generational cap. - EU courts.
Corrado Caruso, a constitutional law professor and one of the lawyers who argued against the decree at the 11 March hearing, told CNN he believes EU courts represent the last viable avenue for descendants.
Practical Impact
For the estimated 80 million people worldwide who claim Italian descent, the ruling narrows the picture considerably. According to CNN, roughly 60,000 applicants who filed before the 27 March 2025 cutoff continue under the old unlimited-generation rules. Everyone else must meet the new criteria or wait for the remaining legal challenges to play out.
The largest affected populations are in Brazil (an estimated 32 million people of Italian descent), Argentina (25 million), and the United States. Diaspora organizations have signaled they will pursue further appeals.
