Nearly 500 days since Italy’s millions-strong diaspora was hit by sweeping changes to the country’s citizenship laws in March 2025, the legal battle for Italian citizenship-by-descent continues.
Now, following last week’s surprise referral of the new two-generation limit for scrutiny by the European Court of Justice, the diaspora has won a major legal victory: the overturning of another recent rule that cut the pathway to citizenship for tens of thousands around the world.
The so-called “minor issue,” imposed by the Italian government in October 2024, ruled that descendants born in so-called ius soli countries, which confer citizenship to anyone born there, would lose their Italian citizenship if their parents naturalized in the new country.
It impacted descendants from the Americas, where ius soli (or jus soli) is predominant, especially hard. People in countries such as the US, Brazil, Argentina and Canada had their way to an Italian passport — ranked the fourth most powerful in the world in July’s Henley Passport Index — blocked overnight.
But now, in a historic U-turn, Italy’s supreme court has overturned the “minor issue,” ruling that children who automatically acquired citizenship in the country of their birth did not lose their Italian citizenship when their parents relinquished their own. The landmark judgment, issued on July 27, follows the April 14 hearing in which the Sezioni Unite, the highest rung of the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s supreme court, heard the cases of three families — one Venezuelan and two American — who had been blocked by the minor issue.
