Ius sanguinis at a crossroads: what Italy's citizenship reform really took away

Roberto Menia has a point worth taking seriously, even if you land on the other side of the debate. The Italian right-wing senator, one of the architects behind the country's 2025 citizenship reform, in an interview with Allora! Italian Australian News argues that ius sanguinis cannot stay unlimited forever. According to him you can't call yourself Italian just because a great-great-grandfather left in 1870, if you've never learned the language, never set foot in Italy, never engaged with Italian culture. It's an intuitive argument. But it's worth putting next to what the reform actually did, and what its critics say it took away.

What changed

For over a century, Italian citizenship by descent worked on a simple principle: if you could document an unbroken bloodline back to an Italian citizen, with no generational cutoff, you were entitled to recognition. That changed with Decree-Law 36/2025, converted into Law 74/2025. The new rules limit automatic transmission to a small number of generations born abroad after the last Italian‑resident ancestor, and require a demonstrable "effective connection" (such as a parent's prior residency in Italy) for claims beyond that limit. The law also reaches backward: people who, under the old rules, already qualified as citizens by descent, but hadn't yet gone through formal recognition, are now judged under the new framework.

The case for reform

Menia's numbers are part of the pro-reform argument, and worth stating. He says Italy's overseas citizen population has roughly doubled in twenty years, from about 3.5 million to 7.2 million, driven mostly by descent claims rather than new emigration. His figure runs a bit high (the 2025 Migrantes report puts the actual total closer to 6.5 million) but the underlying trend, a sharp rise, is well documented in ISTAT and Migrantes data.

Supporters of the reform point to administrative strain: consulates in Brazil and Argentina buried under backlogs, court dockets clogged with citizenship suits, and reported advertisements in Brazil offering discounted "Black Friday" packages to help people claim Italian citizenship. To many observers across the political spectrum, that image captured something troubling: a legal mechanism operating more like a commodity.

The case against: a right, revoked

This is where the reform draws its sharpest criticism. Whatever you think of unlimited descent-based citizenship as policy, it was, until March 2025, a settled legal entitlement. The Italian Supreme Court of Cassation has long treated ius sanguinis citizenship as a status acquired at birth, not granted at the administration's discretion, and provable simply by establishing the bloodline. Several lower courts, including Turin and others, have since referred the new law to the Constitutional Court, arguing that it violates equal‑treatment principles by drawing arbitrary lines between people with identical ancestry, and that it undermines legitimate reliance on a rule that stood essentially unchanged since 1912.

Retroactivity makes this more than an abstract legal dispute. People who were already Italian citizens by birth under the old rules, but hadn't yet filed the paperwork, found that status revoked by decree. At a June 2025 conference opposing the law, one group of legal scholars and members of parliament used sharp language, describing the reform as a "frontal attack on rights, on the Constitution, and on the history of the diaspora," a law that treats overseas Italians as second-class citizens, passed by emergency decree without genuine parliamentary debate. Even the Constitutional Court's own July 2025 ruling, while not directly reviewing the new law, found that the pre-2025 rules allowing unlimited descent-based citizenship weren't themselves unconstitutional, meaning the reform can't be justified as fixing a constitutional flaw. It was a policy choice.

Caught in the middle

For translators and language professionals working with the Italian diaspora, this isn't an abstract legal debate. Citizenship applications, AIRE registrations, sworn translations of birth and marriage certificates going back generations: a lot of that work runs through us, and a lot of our clients are now navigating a much narrower, retroactively-applied set of rules than the ones they built their plans around.

Where it stands

The Constitutional Court has already ruled, and the reform survived. On April 30, 2026, the Court, in Sentenza 63/2026, rejected the constitutional challenges brought by the Turin tribunal, on equality, reasonableness, legitimate reliance, and EU law grounds, and confirmed that the new generational limit is compatible with the Constitution. The law remains fully in force.

That's not quite the end of it, though. The ruling addressed one specific referral; other courts, including Campobasso and Mantova, still have separate challenges pending, particularly over the law's retroactive effect on people considered citizens by birth under the old rules. Within weeks of the Constitutional Court's decision, the Court of Cassation issued its own ruling reaffirming that descent-based citizenship is a status acquired at birth and not subject to expiration, contradicting the Constitutional Court's own position, which treats citizenship as incomplete until formally recognized. Legal commentators are now watching for a formal clash between the two courts, expected to reach the Cassazione's full bench (Sezioni Unite) before the matter is settled.

The real question

Perhaps Menia is right that citizenship shouldn't be a formality detached from any lived connection to Italy. But there's a difference between designing a better system going forward and retroactively stripping status from people who, by the law's own prior terms, already held it. What does a state owe people who relied, in good faith, on a rule it kept in place for over a hundred years?

Ius soli: a quick tour of citizenship by birth in Europe and the Americas

Sometimes it’s useful to step back from national debates and look at the map. Ius soli (citizenship by place of birth) is often presented as either a “U.S. peculiarity” or a simple, automatic rule. In practice, it’s neither. The recent overview by Sky TG24 (“Ius soli, come funziona il diritto di cittadinanza nel mondo? Dagli Usa all'Europa”) on how citizenship by birth works in different countries offers a good starting point, and it’s worth expanding that picture a little for a European audience.

The core examples: US, Canada and the main EU countries

In the United States, birthright citizenship still follows the classic constitutional model: with limited exceptions (for example, children of foreign diplomats), anyone born on U.S. territory acquires citizenship at birth. Canada applies ius soli in a similarly broad way, with automatic citizenship for those born in the country and the usual diplomatic exceptions.

The situation changes once we cross the Atlantic.

• Italy relies primarily on ius sanguinis: being born in Italy to foreign parents does not make you Italian at birth. The standard route is an application at 18, subject to continuous, lawful residence since birth.
• The United Kingdom grants citizenship at birth to children born in the country only if at least one parent is a British citizen or holds permanent residence. Others may acquire citizenship later (for example, after 10 years’ continuous residence).
• Germany introduced a limited form of ius soli in 2000. A child born there to foreign parents can become German at birth if at least one parent has lived in Germany legally for a set number of years and holds a permanent residence permit.
• France applies a conditional ius soli system: in many cases, citizenship is acquired automatically at 18 for those who reside in France and have lived there for a minimum period, with earlier options at 13 or 16 under specific residence and schooling conditions.
• Spain remains largely anchored in ius sanguinis. Children of foreign parents born in Spain are not citizens automatically, although minors born in the country benefit from shorter residence requirements than adults when applying for citizenship.

Already at this stage the pattern is clear: automatic, unconditional ius soli survives primarily in North America, while the larger European systems have moved toward hybrid or “tempered” models that combine birthplace with conditions on parents and residence.

Other European countries: hybrid models, no “pure” ius soli

If we extend the lens to other EU and European states, the picture becomes even more consistent.

Ireland historically had broad ius soli, but reforms have restricted automatic citizenship: today, birth on Irish territory is no longer enough on its own, and the parents’ status and residence play a critical role. Many other EU countries (for example, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Nordic countries use variations on the same theme: ius sanguinis remains the backbone, while some form of ius soli appears only as an additional option, usually tied to residence duration or school attendance.

In practice, this means that:

• No EU member state applies “pure”, unconditional ius soli in the U.S./Canadian sense.
• Several countries allow children born on their territory to acquire citizenship more easily, but almost always subject to residence, integration, or parental‑status requirements.
• The legal vocabulary is similar – ius soli, ius sanguinis, ius culturae – but the underlying thresholds and time frames differ enough that they matter for both legal practice and translation.

From a comparative‑law perspective, ius soli in Europe is less a defining principle and more an adjustment mechanism: a way to soften a strictly descent‑based regime, without embracing automatic citizenship by birth.

The Americas: where unconditional ius soli survives

The Americas offer a very different landscape. Alongside the United States and Canada, most Latin American countries still recognize ius soli in its straightforward form: birth on national territory generally leads to citizenship, again with standard exceptions. For practical purposes, this means:

• In much of North, Central, and South America, children of foreign nationals become citizens of the country where they are born.
• Access to citizenship is therefore less tied to parents’ nationality and more to territorial connection, at least at the basic level.
• Later layers – residence, registration, documentation – can still be complex, but the starting point is different from the European approach.

This concentration of unconditional ius soli in the Western Hemisphere is one of the more striking features of the global map. It also explains why debates around birthright citizenship often look very different in a European parliament than in a Latin American one.

Why this matters (especially for law and translation)

For lawyers and legal translators, these distinctions are not just academic. They affect how we read and render texts on nationality, migration, minors’ rights, and even criminal or family law.

A few practical consequences:

• The same Latin labels (ius soli, ius sanguinis) cover quite different regimes depending on the country, so they can’t be treated as interchangeable “keywords” when translating or comparing statutes.
• Terms like “birth in the territory”, “permanent residence”, “continuous lawful residence”, or “minor” sit at the center of many of these rules and need to be handled with care across languages.
• Changes in one jurisdiction (for example, a tightening of residence requirements, or a shift from automatic to conditional ius soli) immediately ripple into casework, advice to clients, and cross‑border procedures.

If you work with citizenship law, immigration, or cross‑border family cases – or if you translate in these areas – it’s worth keeping this comparative picture in mind. Europe and the Americas are using the same conceptual toolkit, but the way those tools are assembled into actual rules of citizenship by birth is markedly different.

Breaking news: circular wheels reinvented

Preserving file formats is not a novelty feature in 2026. It’s something you only notice when it breaks.

Yet Lara Translate (Yet Another AI Translator) by Translated, an Italian LSP, proudly announces that it can translate DOCX and PPTX files while preserving formatting. This is presented with a tinny trumpet fanfare as a key feature, even though it has been standard in most competent CAT tools for decades.

Back in the 1990s, DejaVu was the first Windows CAT tool many translators like me actually used in production. Somewhere, I must still have a DejaVu installation disk whose entire serial number is simply “11”, and it was on DV that I first worked in a segmented environment on Windows and got my formatted files back at the end. By the time Trados for Windows and other tools followed, the expectation was already set: you feed in a formatted source file, translate in a CAT tool, and get back a clean, formatted target file.

Fast-forward to today, and we see marketing copy that treats “we preserve formatting” as if it were a bold, AI‑powered breakthrough. 

It isn’t. For anyone who has used mainstream CAT tools over the last 15–30 years, it sounds more like reinventing the wheel by loudly claiming your wheels are circular.

If there is something genuinely new under the hood, that would be the part worth explaining. Do they handle edge‑case layouts better? Integrate AI sensibly with TM and terminology? Solve real workflow problems? The email campaign doesn’t say.

Better to entrust your translations to an experienced, tech‑savvy human linguist, someone who knows which tools to use (including AI, when warranted) and when to rely on their own expertise.

Frozen mandates, real consequences: the effects of the Italian Corte di Cassazione silence on citizenship applications

In his article “As the Court of Cassation has yet to rule on Venice ordinanze, crisis grows between Italian citizenship firms and clients” (Insieme, 27 May 2026), Desiderio Peron describes a problem that is technical on paper but very concrete for applicants worldwide. The Court of Venice has sent two cases (RG 5343/2025 and RG 5358/2025) to the Corte di Cassazione, asking it to clarify when a lawyer’s power of attorney in citizenship cases should be considered non‑existent from the outset, not just flawed or incomplete.

The issue revolves around article 182 of the Italian Code of Civil Procedure, which allows certain representation defects to be corrected later. Here, however, the Venetian judge draws a distinction: one thing is a mandate that exists but is filed incorrectly; quite another is a situation where, at the time the action is brought, the lawyer simply has no valid authority to act. In the orders, this is described as “ab origine” lack of the ius postulandi – and that’s a more serious issue than a missing document.

While the Corte di Cassazione thinks it over, proceedings are suspended and uncertainty permeates the entire citizenship industry. Clients worry about cases filed in recent years; companies and intermediaries face frozen pipelines, financial pressure, and, in some regions, drastic downsizing or outright closure. And this is not just about structures in Brazil: anyone who has relied on standardized, outsourced court filings, whether from Lisbon, Toronto, or Melbourne, should at least be asking who actually held the pen in their name.

Everything takes place in a climate already made more difficult by Law 74/2025 (the so‑called “Decreto Tajani”), where formal and procedural objections carry increasing weight. The right to Italian citizenship iure sanguinis may remain in principle, but the real battleground is shifting to how that right is brought before a judge – and whether the person who brought your case to court was ever truly entitled to speak for you.

Unethical interpreting behavior

A recent Guardian article (“Chinese dissident says he was berated by ‘pro-regime’ interpreter for UK police”, by Daniel Boffey and Lyndon Li, 30 May 2026) describes a case that should make anyone working with interpreters uneasy.

Hong Qi, a Chinese dissident recently granted asylum in the UK, contacted police through the 101 non-emergency line after his bank accounts were frozen, leaving his family at risk of homelessness. According to Qi, the interpreter assigned to the call did not just interpret, but allegedly argued with him, questioned his political stance, and—most concerning—refused to pass on parts of his message.

If this account is accurate, it is not a gray area or simply a difficult interaction. It is a blatant breach of interpreting ethics.

Interpreters are not participants in the conversation. They are not there to challenge, filter, or improve what a speaker says. Their job is to render everything faithfully, including tone, intent, and emotional content. 

The reported line—“I will not translate your emotions”—is particularly telling. In a call about potential homelessness, emotion is part of the message, and removing it distorts reality.

What makes this more troubling is the context the Guardian points to: outsourced services, limited in-house language capacity, and credible concerns about political pressure within parts of the Chinese interpreting pool: this is not just about one interpreter having a bad day.

Translation and interpreting are often treated as a background service. Cases like this are a reminder that they are anything but. When the interpreter (or the translator) fails, communication collapses, with very real consequences.

AI dictation for translators: convenience vs. confidentiality

I recently listened to an excellent presentation by Joachim Lépine, during which he mentioned several tools that may be useful for translators. One of them was Blip, an AI-powered dictation tool. I tried it, and it is very good. It handled my Italian-accented English without any difficulty at all, which is not always a given with this kind of software. Most of the time, my Apple TV comes up with rather strange titles when I try to dictate the name of a film or TV show.

But good output is not all that matters.

For translators, and especially for legal translators, the question is not only whether a dictation tool works well, but what happens to the content when you use it. If you dictate the translation of a contract, a certificate, or an HR policy, you are not just saving time and keystrokes. You are processing information that may be confidential, privileged, or otherwise sensitive. Once one looks at it from that angle, the difference between cloud-based and local tools stops being a technical detail and becomes the main issue.

This is why I ended up looking more closely at three dictation tools: Blip, Amical, and Lily Speech.

Blip

Blip is polished. That is the first thing one notices.

It is designed to let you press a hotkey, speak, and get usable text with formatting and cleanup already taken care of. It supports 99+ languages, and the whole point seems to be that you can dictate into practically any app without much friction.

That part works. In my brief test, Blip handled accented English very well. No nonsense, no repeated corrections, no need to slow down and pronounce everything in a staccato way, as with older dictation tools, or slowly as if one were speaking to a rather dim trainee.

That is the good news.

The less good news, at least for some kinds of work, is that Blip is cloud-based: the speech is processed outside your machine. For many tasks, that may be perfectly acceptable. If you are drafting an email, writing notes, or dictating blog ideas, there is probably little to worry about. It is a different matter if you are translating legal documents.

A cloud service may still be secure. But the material still leaves your local environment. For some translators, that will be enough to rule it out, at least for certain assignments.

Pros

• Very easy to use.
• Good formatting and cleanup features.
• Broad language support.
• In my experience, very good with accented English.

Cons

• Cloud-based processing.
• Not ideal for confidential or regulated material.
• One more external layer in the handling of client data.

Links

• Blip AI website
• Blip AI on AppSumo, where the current base lifetime deal for the lowest paid tier is listed at $59.

Amical

Amical is interesting for a more practical reason: it offers cloud processing, just like Blip, but it can run AI models locally as well. That makes it, at least in my view, a more serious option for translators dealing with confidential material.

This is the sort of distinction that product pages often mention as one feature among many, somewhere between “supports many languages” and “has useful shortcuts”. For our kind of work, however, it is not one feature among many. It is the feature. If I am dictating a draft translation of a contract, internal company policy, or some other document that really should not go wandering about beyond my machine, the local option becomes essential.

I tried Amical as well, and the general recognition quality was just as good as Blip’s. The difference is that with Amical, you can keep the processing on your own machine. That matters a great deal.

Pros

• Offers cloud processing and local models.
• Local dictation is available on the free plan, while cloud features are paid.
• Better suited to confidential work.
• Good recognition quality.
• Presented as supporting local privacy and control.

Cons

• Local use may require a bit more setup.
• Performance depends more on your own hardware.
• Slightly less “just press and go” than a cloud-only approach.

Links

• Amical
• Amical on AppSumo, where the current base lifetime deal is listed at $49.

Lily Speech

Lily Speech is a simpler, older-fashioned sort of tool.

It is a Windows speech-to-text application with support for 51 languages. There is a free version, and that alone will make it worth a look for some users.

It belongs to an older generation of tools and is simpler than Blip or Amical. Sometimes that is perfectly fine. Not every tool has to be clever, ambitious, and determined to “revolutionise” one’s workflow before breakfast.

That said, for professional translators with heavier workflows, it will probably feel more limited. It is Windows-only, and its output does not seem to be on the same level as the newer tools. That is not a scientific comparison, merely the fairly obvious impression one gets from using them.

Pros

• Simple.
• Free version available.
• Probably sufficient for basic dictation on Windows.

Cons

• Windows-only.
• More limited than newer tools.
• Might have more problems with accented speech.
• Less obviously suited to demanding professional workflows.

Links

• Lily Speech download

A few use cases

Suppose you are translating a share purchase agreement and dictating portions of your draft. Company names, payment terms, dates, clauses on warranties, indemnities, dispute resolution: all the material that should stay confidential. In that situation, a cloud-based dictation tool is not merely a nice productivity aid. It becomes part of the chain through which confidential information is processed.

Or take HR documentation. Internal disciplinary letters. Medical leave documents. Performance reviews. Perhaps civil-status documents as well: birth certificates, divorce decrees, adoption judgments. Here again, the issue is not whether the dictation tool is good, but whether this is content that should be sent off-machine at all.

This is why the difference between Blip and Amical matters more than one might think at first glance. Blip is convenient and well designed. Amical is more interesting where confidentiality is a genuine concern, because it gives you the possibility of local processing.

Final remark

If you often work with confidential legal or HR material, I would be much more inclined to look at Amical, simply because it gives you a local option.

Lily Speech is worth mentioning, especially for Windows users who want something free and simpler. But for most professional translators, the real comparison is between the other two.

Convenience is useful. Keeping client data on your own machine is the more important distinction.

Italian jus sanguinis after the crackdown: why the courts still matter

Italian citizenship by descent has taken a serious hit over the past year, as I mentioned in several recent blog posts, but a new ruling from Italy’s Supreme Court suggests it may be too early to write off jus sanguinis entirely.

In 2025, the so-called Tajani Decree, later converted into Law 74/2025, tightened the rules on citizenship by descent, and the Constitutional Court later confirmed that more restrictive approach. For many observers, that looked like the end of the old understanding of jus sanguinis as an open-ended right passed down indefinitely through Italian ancestry.

A new decision from the Corte di Cassazione, however, points in a different direction. In judgment no. 13818/2026, the Court reaffirmed that citizenship by descent exists from birth and is “permanent and imprescriptible.” Just as important, it held that when consulates make it effectively impossible to file an application — through endless queues, blocked booking systems, or suspended appointments — that obstacle can justify going directly to court.

In practical terms, this does not undo the recent legal restrictions. It does, however, strengthen the judicial route for people who were shut out by administrative dysfunction rather than by any lack of entitlement. In other words, the door may have narrowed, but the window is still open.

For background, see Rui Badaró’s comments in Italianismo, and also Desiderio Peron’s reporting in Insieme.

Study or work first, citizenship later: Italia Viva Sudamerica’s plan for Italian descendants

In her article “Italia Viva Sudamerica: studio o lavoro in Italia prima della cittadinanza” for Il Globo, journalist Francesca Capelli reports on a proposal from Italia Viva Sudamerica that aims to keep citizenship by descent (ius sanguinis) without generational limits, but introduce a mandatory one‑year stay in Italy before citizenship is granted. The idea is to reduce the workload of Italian consulates in South America while encouraging young people of Italian origin to move to a country facing a serious demographic crisis.

Nicolás Fuster, the party’s South America coordinator, argues that the old system was unsustainable: many people with almost no remaining connection to Italy were obtaining citizenship, at a cost to Italian taxpayers. At the same time, Italy is aging rapidly and needs new, working‑age residents. His proposal would allow anyone of Italian descent to apply, but with a clear condition: after preparing their file (for example in Argentina, Uruguay, or Brazil) and receiving a preliminary green light from the consulate, applicants would spend one year in Italy for study or work, complete the process there, and pass a final interview in Italian.

According to Fuster, this would be a “win‑win”: consulates would be less overloaded, Italy would receive younger taxpayers from countries with a similar culture, and many of these new citizens would likely choose to stay after integrating socially and learning the language. He also stresses that supporting ius sanguinis does not exclude supporting ius soli for people born in Italy to foreign parents. However, Capelli notes that the proposal has a built‑in class filter: only those who can afford a plane ticket and a year in Italy could realistically benefit, which excludes many families in today’s Argentina.

When rules change mid‑process: Italy’s High Court and citizenship by descent ("ius sanguinis")

Italy’s Supreme Court is about to decide whether the recent, stricter citizenship‑by‑descent law (“ius sanguinis”) can be applied retroactively to people who were already in the process of applying when the rules changed. The outcome will be crucial for thousands of descendants of Italian emigrants in the US, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere, whose paths to Italian citizenship have been suddenly blocked or thrown into uncertainty by the so‑called “Meloni law.”

In its article “Cittadinanza ius sanguinis: la Corte Suprema può ribaltare la legge”, AmeVe illustrates this through the case of Sabrina Crawford, from the San Francisco Bay Area, who spent years reconstructing her family history in Calabria to prove that her great‑grandfather never gave up Italian citizenship. Her plans, like those of many others, have been disrupted by new limits that restrict recognition to people whose parents or grandparents never renounced Italian citizenship, raising the question whether long‑standing expectations and rights can simply be switched off by decree.

The AmeVe article also points to a paradox: while Italy braces for a severe demographic decline, it is tightening access both for children of immigrants born in the country and for descendants of Italians abroad who want to reconnect with it. In other words, at the very moment when Italy needs people, it is making it harder for those already tied to the country—by birth, by blood, or by history—to be formally recognized as Italian. The Court’s ruling will say a lot about how Italy chooses to balance legal certainty, administrative control, and its relationship with the diaspora.

Italian citizenship by descent: key questions before the Italian Supreme Court

A recent article on Studio Cataldi’s site explains that on 14 April 2026 the Supreme Court debated two central issues on Italian citizenship by descent (ius sanguinis). First, it must resolve a long‑running conflict on whether a child who is already a dual citizen from birth loses Italian citizenship automatically when an Italian parent later naturalises in another country while the child is still a minor. Some court decisions say yes, others say that citizenship acquired from birth should not be lost in this way, and the Court is now expected to give a single, authoritative answer.

The Court will also address how the 2025 reform applies over time. The new rules restrict recognition of ius sanguinis for people born abroad who already hold another citizenship, unless specific conditions are met. It remains unclear whether these provisions can affect situations that arose before the reform, potentially impacting rights considered “acquired” under the previous framework.

According to the article, the Supreme Court’s ruling will be a crucial step in clarifying both the historical rules on loss and transmission of citizenship and the temporal reach of the 2025 reform, providing much‑needed guidance to courts and public administrations.

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If you’re affected by these changes and are gathering documents for an Italian citizenship case, feel free to get in touch about translation support. I specialize in the translation from English into Italian of official and administrative documents and can help ensure your paperwork is translated correctly and on time.