ROME — In a landmark decision that reshapes Italy’s citizenship-by-descent policies for diaspora communities worldwide, Italy’s Court of Cassation — the nation’s highest judicial body — has ruled that children born with Italian citizenship do not automatically forfeit that status when an Italian parent naturalizes as a citizen of another country during the child’s minority. The judgment, finalized Sunday and published publicly Wednesday, comes from the court’s United Sections panel, the top body tasked with resolving conflicting legal interpretations, and reverses a restrictive judicial trend that blocked hundreds of thousands of citizenship claims over recent years.
The dispute at the heart of the case, widely known among immigration lawyers and diaspora communities as the “Minor Issue,” has lingered for decades, creating uncertainty for thousands of ancestry-based citizenship applications tied to Italian families that emigrated between the late 19th century and early 20th century. Starting in 2023, a series of lower court rulings adopted a narrow reading of Italian citizenship law, holding that when an Italian parent acquired foreign citizenship while their child was still a minor, the child automatically lost their birthright Italian citizenship. This interpretation broke the line of citizenship transmission for subsequent generations, leading to widespread rejection of applications from descendants of Italian emigrants.
In its new ruling, the court clarified that under Italy’s longstanding citizenship framework, individuals who gain Italian citizenship at birth via iure sanguinis — the principle of citizenship by bloodline — retain that status indefinitely even if their parent naturalizes abroad. This holding applies specifically to children born in nations that grant birthright citizenship automatically, such as the United States. Because the original citizenship is never lost, the right to pass that status down to future generations of descendants remains intact.
Marco Mellone, the attorney who represented citizenship applicants in the landmark case, explained that the ruling marks a full reversal of the restrictive policy that derailed thousands of claims, most notably from U.S. citizens of Italian descent. “The Supreme Court of Cassation has completely changed its position and gone back, confirming that all these Italian-American families — and, more generally, families in all countries where this situation existed — regain the right to Italian citizenship by descent,” Mellone told the Associated Press.
The decision carries sweeping implications for the global Italian diaspora, which numbers in the millions across North and South America, where millions of people trace ancestral roots to 19th and 20th century emigration waves from Italy. Mellone estimates that roughly hundreds of thousands of families had their citizenship claims blocked by the 2023 restrictive interpretation, all of whom now stand to reactivate their applications.
Legal experts note the ruling will significantly strengthen the position of applicants whose claims were rejected solely due to the Minor Issue dispute, while offering binding authoritative guidance for judges overseeing thousands of pending citizenship cases. It is also expected to shape how Italian administrative agencies and consulates around the world evaluate future applications. While it remains uncertain whether Italy’s Interior Ministry and global consular network will formally update their processing guidelines to align with the new holding, rulings from the United Sections panel carry extraordinary legal weight in Italian law, as the body is specifically convened to settle conflicting legal interpretations. As Mellone put it, there is no judicial body above the panel, which very rarely reverses its own prior precedent.
The ruling arrives amid growing demand for citizenship-by-descent in Italy, and ongoing legal wrangling over the scope of ancestry-based citizenship rights. In a separate ongoing dispute, a law pushed by Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani that tightens restrictions on citizenship transmission to more distant generations has been referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, with oral arguments and a ruling expected to unfold in 2025.