Italian Citizenship — Constitutional Court Ruling No. 142/2025 Reaffirms Citizenship by Descent and Raises Doubts About the Constitutionality of the Tajani Law
Key Points, Current Requirements, and Legal Warnings

Italian Citizenship — Constitutional Court Ruling No. 142/2025, July 31, 2025

“… the current legal framework has emphasized that the status civitatis based on a parent-child relationship is permanent, imprescriptible, and enforceable at any time, requiring only simple proof of the constitutive fact — namely, being born to an Italian citizen.”

“… the Constitution refers to citizenship as belonging to a community that shares common cultural and linguistic roots, while at the same time being an open society that embraces pluralism and protects minorities. Finally, the constitutional norms establish a correlation between citizenship and the territory of the State, understood as the space that reflects a common cultural humus and a shared commitment to constitutional principles.”

On July 31, the Constitutional Court of Italy published Ruling No. 142/2025, which addressed the constitutional challenges brought by the courts of Bologna, Rome, Milan, and Florence. These challenges primarily targeted Article 1 of Law No. 91 of 1992 — the legal framework in effect prior to the current Law No. 74, which stems from the controversial Tajani Decree issued on February 28.

Why is this ruling important, and why begin by quoting these two paragraphs in particular?

From a practical standpoint, legal actions initiated before March 27, 2025, remain protected under the previous legislation. In other words, they are not subject to the new provisions introduced by the reform, including additional requirements such as effective residence in Italy, language proficiency, or proof of cultural integration.

The referring courts challenged the constitutionality of Article 1 of Law No. 91/1992 on the grounds that it placed no limits on the recognition of citizenship iure sanguinis — that is, by descent — thus allowing automatic access to Italian citizenship even in cases where there is no territorial, cultural, or social link to the country.

This spirit of “limitation” is deeply embedded in the currently applicable Tajani Law, which seeks to restrict the right to citizenship based on the existence of a genuine link, applying criteria that are clearly arbitrary and restrictive.

Although the Constitutional Court dismissed the challenges brought by the referring courts, it simultaneously sent a clear message to the intellectual framework of the Tajani Decree, exposing the constitutional vulnerabilities of the new citizenship regime, which has been in force by decree since March 28 and by law since May 24.

Although the Court did not directly address the Tajani Law—since it was not before the authority—by reaffirming long-standing constitutional principles of citizenship and developing new lines of interpretation, it has legally jeopardized the entire new framework implemented by the current government.

Now let’s review the core principles established in Constitutional Court Ruling No. 142/2025.

First—and most fundamentally—the Court firmly reaffirms the principle of ius sanguinis. According to the ruling, the constitutive requirement for Italian citizenship is being a "son" or "daughter" of an Italian citizen, with no need for additional requirements.

Accordingly, citizenship is acquired at origin, and it is sufficient to provide simple proof of the constitutive fact: being born to a person who holds Italian citizenship.

Against this clear principle, the Tajani Law introduces heavy restrictions:
it not only limits the right to two generations but also requires that the ancestor transmit citizenship only if they are exclusively Italian. If they are not—such as when holding dual nationality—the descendant must meet additional conditions, for example having resided in Italy for at least two years. In this case, the "child of an Italian" is no longer considered Italian, but merely an “oriundo,” a category that degrades the legal and symbolic bond with the Italian State.

The result is that millions of "origin" Italian citizens—as the Court defines them—have been excluded from formal recognition of that status due to the effect of the Tajani Law.

Nonetheless, the Court was categorical: the "origin" right to citizenship is permanent, imprescriptible and enforceable at any time.

This means it cannot be conditioned by retroactive measures or requirements that violate the principle of equality before the law, such as exclusive nationality of the ascendant or residency in Italy.

The second key concept expressed by the Constitutional Court in Ruling No. 142/2025 is that citizenship is not merely a formal legal connection, but represents belonging to a community of common cultural and linguistic roots, which must be open to pluralism and protective of minorities.

Within this framework, the Court establishes that there is an intrinsic correlation between citizenship and territory—not only as a physical space, but as cultural humus.

The concept of cultural humus—explicitly used in the ruling—refers to the substratum of social, spiritual, cultural, symbolic and linguistic factors that encourage, shape or foster the emergence of ideas, behaviors, values, creativity and traditions.

Just as in agriculture humus is the fertile ground that nourishes plant growth, in the social and cultural sphere this humus represents the shared context in which a community builds its identity, shares memories, transmits language and traditions, and gives rise to new forms of cultural expression.

This approach allows us to see that citizenship cannot be restricted exclusively to a physical territorial dimension—residence in Italy—but must encompass a broader, transnational, dynamic and culturally living dimension.

As the historical experience of Latin America, the United States and Australia shows, millions of descendants of Italians “reconstructed” a living Italian identity there, sharing language, memories, customs, traditions—shaping a new dimension, a new cultural and economic space of thousands of Italian entities and businesses.

Far from having dissolved, this identity remains alive and has generated new ways of being Italian in the world.

Denying this broad cultural dimension of citizenship, in favor of a selective, closed and nearly purely biological vision, reduces political belonging to a criterion of mere “genealogical purity”.

This type of approach directly conflicts with the constitutional principles of equality, inclusion and pluralism, and deprives of democratic meaning the notion of national community enshrined in the Italian Constitution.

The Constitutional Court completes the pluralistic, dynamic and expansive concept of citizenship with a distinction of roles that should be read at the same time as a clear and forceful institutional warning:

“Given the complex and articulated meaning of constitutional references to citizenship, it is up to the legislator—who enjoys particularly broad discretion—to determine the premises and conditions for acquiring the status civitatis.”

However—and here lies the true core of this warning—the Court reminds us that not everything is valid within that discretion. It falls upon the constitutional judge to verify, under the criteria of non‐manifest unreasonableness and proportionality, that the norms regulating the acquisition of citizenship do not resort to criteria “foreign or incompatible” with constitutional principles or with the multiple elements that—as has already been emphasized—define and give substance to the contemporary notion of citizenship: its origin nature, pluralism, protection of minorities, and the connection to cultural humus.

The Court cannot usurp the legislator through a “manipulative intervention” in the system. But it does have the duty to monitor, preventing the legitimacy of norms that—under the guise of order—introduce arbitrary restrictions alien to constitutional values.

The explicit reference to “foreign or incompatible criteria” could perfectly align with the lines introduced by the Tajani Decree, which provides—for example—for the retroactive loss of citizenship for individuals born abroad solely because their ancestors were not exclusively Italian citizens or because they exceed a certain number of generations, without regard for their identity, ties or cultural roots.

This constitutes a rupture with the principle of “original right” to citizenship by descent as reaffirmed by the Court in this ruling. It represents a policy that directly violates equality, disregards pluralism and denies the cultural richness of Italian communities abroad—ultimately configuring an exclusive and regressive vision of citizenship.

We now arrive at a part of the ruling of enormous relevance, whose implications, as we will see at the end of this article, may be decisive in evaluating the future constitutionality of the Tajani Law.

The Constitutional Court issues a clear and specific warning regarding European Union law, which stands as an additional limit to the national legislator’s discretion, especially in light of the well-established case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

Indeed, the ruling recalls that the CJEU has frequently censured national norms that caused the loss of status civitatis vis-à-vis a Member State—resulting directly in the loss of European citizenship. State nationality functions as the gateway and necessary condition to exercise fundamental rights within the legal space of the Union.

The Italian Court therefore underscores a key point: treaty provisions are incompatible with national rules that in no circumstance foresee an individualized assessment of the personal consequences that losing citizenship might cause for the affected individuals under EU law.

This approach reinforces the principle of proportionality as a cornerstone of Union law: any measure restricting a fundamental right must respond to a concrete need, pursue a legitimate aim, and not be invasive.

From this perspective, the Tajani reform—by establishing a mechanism of citizenship loss operating automatically, indiscriminately and collectively—could be potentially incompatible with the founding principles of the Treaty on the European Union, particularly proportionality, reasonableness, and effective protection of individual rights.

Why is this assessment crucial from a European perspective?

Because the first judicial decision directly challenging the constitutionality of the Tajani Law—issued by the Turin Tribunal and currently referred to the Constitutional Court, which will review it in February 2026—was made possible thanks to a petition developed from a decidedly European standpoint.

This action was driven by AGIS (Associazione Giuristi Iure Sanguinis) and AUCI (Avvocati Uniti per la Cittadinanza Italiana), two legal organizations that structured a sophisticated multi-layered argument, grounded not only in Italian constitutional principles but also in the CJEU’s case law and in EU law on citizenship as a derived right.

Only four months have passed since the announcement of the so-called “Decree of Shame”—the controversial Tajani Decree of February 28, 2025, which seeks to retroactively revoke the citizenship of millions of Italians abroad by imposing additional conditions contrary to the original nature of ius sanguinis and the pluralism that defines the republican community.

Thus, although the Court has not directly judged Law No. 74/2025, it has indeed drawn very clear red lines that legally threaten its future constitutionality, since the foundations on which that reform rests appear to clash head-on with the founding values of the Italian constitutional order.

The board seems to have shifted—and quickly.
The King already feels cornered, and the Tajani Law is now formally in check.

Pablo Munini
Attorney
T° 55 F° 386
Public Bar Association of Buenos Aires