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.