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?