On July 31, 2025, the Italian Constitutional Court deposited judgment no. 142. The ruling declared inadmissible and unfounded various issues of constitutional legitimacy raised by the Courts of Bologna, Rome, Milan, and Florence. These issues concerned Article 1 of Law No. 91 of 1992, specifically the part stating that “[is] a citizen by birth: a) the child of a father or mother who are citizens,” which does not provide any limitation on acquiring citizenship iure sanguinis (by blood).
The proceedings were initiated by applicants who are descendants of Italian citizens but were born abroad, reside there, and hold the citizenship of another country. The referring courts challenged the legislation for failing to establish any criteria to ensure an effective connection with the Italian legal system, which, in their view, is absent in the cases in question.
The Constitutional Court stated that the legislature enjoys “a particularly broad margin of discretion” in determining the conditions for acquiring citizenship, while the Court's role is to ensure that the rules governing the acquisition of status civitatis (citizenship status) do not rely on criteria entirely alien to or in conflict with constitutional principles.
The Court observed that the referring judges did not generally challenge the suitability of the parent-child relationship as a justification for acquiring citizenship in light of constitutional principles. Actually, they questioned whether, in cases involving applicants with various ties to foreign legal systems, mere descent from an Italian citizen is sufficient to justify acquiring citizenship, absent other connections to the Italian legal system.
The multitude and generality of the variables underlying the raised doubts of constitutional legitimacy—and, correspondingly, the range of discretionary choices the Court would have to make among multiple options with significant systemic implications—led to the inadmissibility of most of the constitutional issues raised. Especially, the challenges concerning Articles 1, 3, and 117, first paragraph, of the Constitution were declared inadmissible.
Moreover, the Court deemed unfounded the claims alleging an unreasonable disparity in treatment between the cited rule and other mechanisms for acquiring citizenship. For these challenges, the Court found that the “substantial identity of situations”—required to establish such a constitutional flaw—was lacking.
Lastly, the Court rejected the requests made by the parties to rule on the new legislation—introduced during the proceedings through Decree-Law No. 36 of 2025, converted into Law No. 74 of 2025—which places limits on the acquisition of citizenship iure sanguinis. The Court clarified that this legislation does not apply to the cases from which the constitutional issues under review originated.
The ruling is important because most of the arguments raised by the referring Courts are the same included in the parliamentary relation to the new law 74/2025. Apparently, not all the reasons exposed by the Legislator to justify the new law would be approved by the Constitutional Court. This opens possibility to challenge some profiles of the new law in the Courts.