The Court of Justice of the European Union, the top judicial institution of the EU, based in Luxembourg, could wipe out the controversial citizenship law, forcing the Italian government to rewrite and pass new legislation.
U-turn, about-face, backpedal — all of the above.
The Italian Constitutional Court is now asking the European Union’s Court of Justice to rule on whether the country’s citizenship-by-descent restrictions violate EU law.
This decision by the constitutional court completely undermines its own ruling, which upheld Italy’s 2025 law imposing harsh restrictions on qualifying for Italian citizenship.
Imposed without warning in March 2025, the restrictions limit eligibility only to those with an Italian parent or grandparent — a move that sent shockwaves through the Italian diaspora, as millions were suddenly cut off from pursuing citizenship to Italy and thousands were severed mid-application.
EU case law, over the past three decades, has consistently held that citizenship can’t be stripped away abruptly, disproportionately, or without warning.
“It’s a 180-degree change of direction,” Marco Mellone, one of four attorneys fighting the law head-on, told CNN. “It’s a confession that they made a mistake … they had the chance to refer it three months ago and didn’t, it’s clear they changed their opinion.”
The challenge hinges on whether claimants were born Italians with unrecognized citizenship, as long-established Italian case law had ruled.
If the ECJ rules against the citizenship restrictions, they will be completely wiped out, leaving the Italian government to write new legislation that complies with EU rules.
The final ruling could take months, or more than a year, to come down.
The ‘Minor Issue’ Is No More
The Corte Suprema di Cassazione (Italy’s Supreme Court) in late July struck down the “minor issue,” thanks in part to advocacy that was led by Italian Sons and Daughters of America (ISDA).
In 2024, Italy’s Ministry of the Interior introduced a controversial rule known as the “minor issue.”
Under the rule, if an Italian citizen had a child abroad, and then that parent naturalized in another country — becoming, say, a U.S. citizen — while the child was still a minor, the child’s tie to Italian citizenship was considered broken. That meant not just the child, but all of their descendants, would lose any claim to citizenship through that parent.
The sudden implementation of the issue cut off those whose applications for Italian citizenship were already in progress, but thanks to today’s ruling, thousands of dual citizenship applications are revived.
In 1930, immigrant families banded together to create the Italian Sons and Daughters of America (ISDA), now one of the most prominent and financially successful Italian American organizations in the nation. In the last decade, we built a 730,000-strong social media community, grew our not-for-profit fraternal association, ISDA Financial Life, to nearly a half billion dollars in member assets, co-founded the Russo Brothers Italian American Filmmaker Forum (RBIAFF), and launched the fastest-growing Italian American publication (La Nostra Voce).
