Italy’s Supreme Court Resolves the “Minor Issue” in the Diaspora’s Favor
What Just Happened
With Sentenza 24045/2026, published July 26, the Sezioni Unite, the united sections of the Supreme Court that exist precisely to settle conflicts in Italian case law, ruled on a case brought by the descendants of an Italian-born woman who naturalized in Venezuela while her son was still a child. The Rome Court of Appeal had held that her naturalization dragged the boy’s Italian citizenship away with hers. The Supreme Court overturned that decision and sent the case back with four binding principles (full ruling, PDF).
The Four Principles, in Plain English
1. Cases filed before March 27, 2025 stay under the old law. The Court confirmed, at the highest level available in Italy, that the 2025 reform does not apply to judicial citizenship claims filed before the decree’s cutoff. If your case was in court before that date, it is decided under the rules that existed when you filed. That protection is now settled law.
2. The “minor issue” is resolved. This is the heart of it. Under Article 7 of the 1912 citizenship law, a child born abroad to an Italian parent in a country that grants citizenship by birthplace was a dual citizen from birth, and kept Italian citizenship even when the parent later naturalized. Since a pair of restrictive Supreme Court rulings in 2023 and 2024, tribunals across Italy had been rejecting family lines where the emigrant ancestor was a minor when their parent naturalized abroad. Thousands of families were told their line was broken. The united sections have now overruled that reading. Those lines were never broken.
3. The narrow exception stays narrow. The provision that lets a parent’s loss of citizenship pull a child’s along with it applies only to children who held exclusively Italian citizenship, typically adoption scenarios, and essentially never to a child born on American, Brazilian, Argentine, or Venezuelan soil, who was a citizen of that country from birth.
4. Maternal lines are fully equal. The constitutional equality of mothers and fathers applies not only to passing citizenship at birth but also to the consequences of a parent’s naturalization. Fitting, given that the family that won this case descends through a mother.
The Court grounded all of this in a principle worth savoring: citizenship acquired by blood is a permanent and imprescriptible fundamental right, and rules stripping it must be read restrictively.
What This Means for Your Case
If You Filed Before March 27, 2025, or Have a Case Pending Now
Two layers of good news. Your case is confirmed to run under the old law, and if your line was ever flagged for a “minor problem,” an ancestor who was a child when their parent naturalized, that objection has just been overruled by the highest formation of Italy’s highest ordinary court. Paused cases can move. Theories used to reject lines like yours are no longer good law.
If you qualify under one of the 2025 reform’s exceptions (an Italian-born parent or grandparent, among others) but your documentation trail ran through a “broken” minor link: that link is very likely repaired. Lines written off in the last two years deserve a fresh look.
If the 2025 Reform Excluded You
We will always be straight with you: this ruling does not reopen the door by itself. The Court expressly confirmed that the 2025 cutoff governs court claims filed after March 27, 2025. Your path remains the question now pending before the EU Court of Justice, referred there just four days ago. But notice the pattern: every time Italy’s senior courts examine how citizenship by descent actually works, they rule that the right was real all along. That is the legal ground the European case will be argued on.
One honest caveat: the Court reserved the effect of special provisions in bilateral international treaties. For a subset of lines, particularly some Argentine ones touched by the 1971 Italy-Argentina convention, the interplay needs case-by-case review. This is exactly the kind of detail worth having assessed properly rather than assumed in either direction.
Four Days, Two Courts, One Direction
On July 23, the Constitutional Court handed the question of the 2025 reform’s retroactive exclusion to the EU Court of Justice. On July 26, the Supreme Court’s united sections confirmed the old law’s protections and restored thousands of family lines cut off by the minor issue. The new law is under European review; the old law keeps being vindicated. For families whose cases live under the old rules, the landscape has not looked this good since before March 2025.