Constitutional Court Rules on D.L. 36/2025: What It Means and Why It Is Far From Over

On March 12, 2026, the Italian Constitutional Court issued a press release on the Tribunal of Turin’s challenge to D.L. 36/2025. Media headlines treated it as a final verdict. The reality is far more complex, and the most important decisions are still ahead.

The March 12 Press Release: What Actually Happened

On March 12, 2026, the Italian Constitutional Court issued a press release regarding the Tribunal of Turin’s challenge to D.L. 36/2025, the decree that introduced a two-generation limit on citizenship by descent. Many media outlets reported this as a definitive endorsement of the reform.

That reading is premature. The full judgment has not been published. The questions declared inadmissible were rejected on procedural grounds, not because the Court found them meritless. In Italian constitutional law, “inadmissible” often means the specific remedy requested would require legislative choices that the Court cannot make on its own. This is an important distinction: these arguments are not dead. They simply need to come through a different door.

The press release is just two paragraphs long and does not explain the Court’s reasoning on any individual argument. It specifically identifies only two of the many constitutional parameters raised by the Tribunal of Turin as “inadmissible” (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ECHR Protocol 4 challenges) and says nothing specific about how the remaining arguments, including the core retroactivity challenge under Articles 2, 3, and 117 of the Constitution, were resolved.

Why the Written Motivations Matter More Than the Press Release

In Italian constitutional practice, the most important elements of a decision often emerge only in the written motivations (motivazioni). It is in the reasoning, not in the press release, that the Court clarifies the scope of its ruling, addresses individual arguments, and, in many cases, issues explicit or implicit guidance to the legislature.

The Constitutional Court has a long history of using its written motivations to communicate far more than the bare outcome suggests. The Court frequently includes what are known as moniti (warnings or signals) directed at the legislature, indicating areas where future legislative action is needed or where the current framework is constitutionally fragile even if the immediate challenge was not sustained.

It would not be the first time that the Constitutional Court, through its reasoning, signals the need for legislative intervention even where the formal outcome appears restrictive. Until those motivations are available, any interpretation of the decision as definitive or exhaustive should be treated with significant caution.

What the Court Has Already Said in Favor of Citizenship Rights

These words were written by the Constitutional Court itself in July 2025, four months after D.L. 36/2025 was already in force. The Court was fully aware of the reform when it issued this press release.

In Sentenza 142/2025, the Court adopted the Cassazione’s characterization that citizenship acquired iure sanguinis is acquired at “original title” (a titolo originario), is “permanent and imprescriptible,” and is “justiciable at any time.” The Court also declined to issue any warning (monito) to the legislature about the previous system of unlimited ius sanguinis, meaning it saw no constitutional defect in the prior regime that would need correcting.

These principles have not been withdrawn or overruled. Legal scholars across Italy have noted the significant tension between these statements and the retroactive mechanism of D.L. 36/2025, which declares that certain people “are considered never to have acquired” Italian citizenship. If the Court’s own characterization of citizenship as a permanent, original right stands, then a law that retroactively declares it never existed raises serious constitutional questions.

Why This Matters: It’s the Judges, Not the Petitioners

An important point of context for anyone following these developments from outside Italy. In Italy, a law cannot be challenged directly by citizens in the way a lawsuit works in the United States. The Italian Constitution reserves the power to review the constitutionality of legislation exclusively to the Corte Costituzionale (Constitutional Court), and only a sitting judge can refer a question of constitutionality to that Court.

This means that every single one of the constitutional challenges described in this article was initiated not by the applicants or their attorneys, but by the judges themselves. These are career magistrates within Italy’s professional judiciary, individuals who have passed rigorous national examinations (concorso in magistratura) and who serve as independent officers of the state. They are not elected, not politically appointed, and not advocates for either side.

When a judge in Torino, Campobasso, or Mantova suspends a proceeding and refers a question to the Constitutional Court, that judge is exercising a solemn constitutional prerogative enshrined in Article 134 of the Italian Constitution. They are putting their professional assessment on record that the law in question raises serious doubts of constitutional legitimacy.

The fact that multiple independent judges across different Italian cities have reached the same conclusion, that D.L. 36/2025 raises unresolved constitutional problems, carries significant weight. This is not adversarial litigation driven by one side’s attorneys. It is the Italian judiciary itself, from within, signaling that the reform requires deeper scrutiny.

How Italian Constitutional Review Works

For readers unfamiliar with the Italian legal system, it is helpful to understand the structure of constitutional review, as it differs significantly from the American model.

Italy does not have a system where any court can strike down a law as unconstitutional (as in the U.S. model of judicial review established in Marbury v. Madison). Instead, Italy uses a centralized system of constitutional review, in which only the Constitutional Court (Corte Costituzionale) has the power to declare a law unconstitutional.

The process works through what is called giudizio incidentale (incidental review): when an ordinary judge, in the course of deciding a case, believes that a law applicable to that case may be unconstitutional, the judge suspends the proceeding and refers the question to the Constitutional Court. The referring judge must explain why the question is relevant to the case at hand (rilevanza) and why the doubt of unconstitutionality is not manifestly unfounded (non manifesta infondatezza).

This structure explains why the Torino, Campobasso, and Mantova referrals coexist as separate proceedings, and why the outcome of one does not necessarily determine the outcome of the others. Each judge has raised different constitutional arguments, and the Court is treating them independently.

The Campobasso and Mantova Referrals in Detail

The Tribunal of Campobasso, under Judge Claudia Carissimi, issued its first referral on February 5, 2026. Unlike the Torino referral, which challenged the retroactivity primarily under Articles 2, 3, and 117 of the Constitution, Campobasso formally invoked three additional and powerful constitutional provisions:

The Tribunal of Mantova went even further, raising ten articles of the Constitution in its referral, the broadest challenge filed to date. In addition to everything Campobasso raised, the Mantova referral invokes:

Article 1 (popular sovereignty) — Raising the question of what it means to strip citizenship from a population that may be numerically comparable to Italy’s resident citizenry.

Article 24 (the right of defense and access to justice) — This argument is especially pointed: if the only way to preserve citizenship was to file a lawsuit by 23:59 on March 27, 2025, and citizens had no prior notice that this deadline was coming, then their constitutional right to defend themselves was effectively denied. You cannot impose a forfeiture deadline that expires before people know it exists.

Articles 56 and 58 (composition of Parliament) — Raising the implications of stripping voting rights from a large diaspora population and the effect this has on Italy’s democratic representation.

Critically, after the Constitutional Court’s March 12 press release on the Torino case, the Campobasso court did not stand down. On March 16, 2026, Judge Rossella Casillo issued a new decision deferring proceedings and reaffirming the existence of constitutional concerns that, in her assessment, had not been fully addressed by the Court’s press release.. Two additional Campobasso referrals were then published in the Official Gazette on March 18, 2026. The Mantova hearing is confirmed for June 9, 2026.

The Court of Cassation: A Separate and Equally Important Track

Running parallel to the Constitutional Court proceedings, Italy’s Corte di Cassazione (Court of Cassation, the supreme court for civil and criminal matters) is also poised to weigh in. The two courts serve different functions: the Constitutional Court reviews the constitutionality of laws, while the Cassazione ensures uniform interpretation of the law across all Italian courts.

On April 14, 2026, the Sezioni Unite (Joint Sections) of the Cassazione, its highest and most authoritative formation, will hear arguments in the Aula Magna at Piazza Cavour, Rome, on two critical questions:

The retroactivity of D.L. 36/2025: Whether the new law can be applied to situations that arose before its entry into force, examined through the lens of the Cassazione’s own well-developed jurisprudence on non-retroactivity.

The “minor issue” (questione dei minori): Whether children automatically lost Italian citizenship when their father naturalized in another country under the old 1912 citizenship law (Legge 555/1912, Article 12). This affects an estimated 60 to 70 percent of descendants of Italian emigrants to the United States, and a significant proportion of descendants in other countries including Brazil, Argentina, and Canada.

Sezioni Unite rulings carry binding authority across all Italian courts. When the Sezioni Unite establish a principle of law, lower courts are obliged to follow it, and any court wishing to depart from it must refer the question back to the Sezioni Unite with a reasoned explanation. This makes the April 14 hearing potentially more consequential for the day-to-day adjudication of citizenship cases than any single Constitutional Court ruling.

The Cassazione has its own well-developed jurisprudence on retroactivity. The Sezioni Unite have consistently held, most notably in Sentenza 29459/2019 (regarding retroactivity of restrictions to humanitarian protection under the 2018 Salvini Decree), that when new legislation lacks an express retroactivity provision, the general principle of Article 11 of the Preleggi controls: the law does not apply retroactively. The Cassazione has also drawn a critical distinction between substantive norms (which cannot be applied retroactively without express provision and constitutional justification) and procedural norms (which apply immediately under the tempus regit actum principle). The characterization of D.L. 36/2025’s provisions as substantive or procedural will be central to the Sezioni Unite’s analysis.

The Principle of Non-Retroactivity: 80 Years of Precedent

The non-retroactivity of law is not an abstract legal concept in Italy. It is a foundational principle with deep roots, codified since 1942 and reinforced by decades of constitutional jurisprudence.

While this principle is not given absolute constitutional protection outside of criminal law (where Article 25 of the Constitution makes it inviolable), the Constitutional Court has built an extensive body of case law establishing that retroactive legislation must satisfy strict conditions.

The Ragionevolezza (Reasonableness) Test

The Court has repeatedly held that outside criminal law, the legislature may enact retroactive provisions, but only if the retroactivity finds adequate justification on the plane of reasonableness and does not conflict with other constitutionally protected values (Sentenze 229/1999, 393/2006, among many others). The burden of justification falls on the state, not on the citizens affected.

The Legittimo Affidamento (Legitimate Expectations) Doctrine

The principle of legitimate expectations, closely connected to legal certainty (certezza del diritto), has progressively emerged in the Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence as a constitutionally protected value capable of operating as a limit on retroactive legislation. Citizens are entitled to rely on the stability of the legal framework when organizing their lives and exercising their rights. A person who was born Italian under a legal regime that had been stable for over a century had every reason to rely on the permanence of that status.

Key Precedents on Retroactivity

Sentenza 69/2014 — The Court held that retroactive laws violate the Constitution when they undermine citizens’ reliance on the stability of the legal order. The Court called this an irreducible limit on legislative power, finding that the “principle of reliance on legal certainty” constrains retroactivity and that its violation constitutes unreasonableness warranting a declaration of unconstitutionality.

Sentenza 10/2015 (the “Robin Hood Tax” case) — In what scholars consider a watershed moment, the Court declared a tax provision unconstitutional but limited its own ruling to prospective effect only, explicitly recognizing the power to modulate the temporal dimension of its decisions. The Court stated that its role as guardian of the Constitution in its entirety requires it to avoid situations where declaring a law unconstitutional would paradoxically produce effects even more incompatible with the Constitution. This is precisely the type of surgical outcome the Torino judge proposed for D.L. 36/2025.

Sentenza 169/2022 — The Court struck down a retroactive provision that removed rights already acquired, finding it violated Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution.

Sentenza 70/2024 — The Court emphasized that the degree of consolidation of the subjective situation originally recognized and then overturned by the retroactive intervention must be weighed in the constitutional analysis. Citizenship, which the Cassazione has characterized as permanent and imprescriptible, arguably represents the most consolidated legal status a person can hold.

The “Rapporti Esauriti” Doctrine

Italian law recognizes that even when a law is declared unconstitutional, the effects of that declaration have a natural boundary: they do not disturb rapporti esauriti (exhausted relationships), meaning legal situations that have been definitively concluded by a final judgment, by the expiration of prescription or forfeiture deadlines, or by other irreversible acts. However, citizenship has been consistently characterized by the Cassazione as not subject to prescription or forfeiture. It is “justiciable at any time.” This means citizenship claims are, by definition, never “exhausted” in the legal sense, which has significant implications for how retroactivity interacts with citizenship law.

What a Favorable Outcome Could Look Like

One of the most likely positive outcomes, and the one that the Tribunal of Torino specifically proposed to the Constitutional Court, is a partial declaration of unconstitutionality: the generational limits introduced by D.L. 36/2025 could be upheld as a legitimate exercise of legislative discretion going forward, while the retroactive application to people already born is struck down as unconstitutional.

Under this scenario, the Court would strike the specific language in Article 3-bis that extends its application to persons born “also before the date of entry into force of this article” (“anche prima della data di entrata in vigore del presente articolo”), while preserving the generational limit as applied prospectively. For those already born, the Court could require a reasonable transitional period, perhaps six months or one year, during which individuals could present their citizenship applications under the prior rules.

This is not speculative. It follows directly from:

The Court’s own precedent in Sentenza 10/2015 — demonstrating the Court’s willingness and ability to modulate the temporal effects of its rulings, limiting unconstitutionality to prospective application only.

Germany’s 1999 citizenship reform (Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz) — which the Torino judge specifically cited. Germany introduced a comparable generational limit to its ius sanguinis transmission but applied it only to persons born after January 1, 2000, with no retroactive effect on existing citizens. This reform has been in force for over 25 years without legal challenge, demonstrating that a prospective-only approach is both legally defensible and practically workable.

The CJEU’s jurisprudence in Tjebbes (C-221/17) and the Danish citizenship case (C-689/21) — which consistently requires that withdrawal of citizenship include individualized proportionality assessments and reasonable transitional periods.

In practical terms, there is a well-established path to an outcome where the new generational limits stand as valid law going forward, but cannot reach back to strip citizenship from people who were already born Italian under the prior rules.

The European Dimension

The Italian citizenship question does not exist in a vacuum. It carries a significant European Union law dimension that operates independently of the Italian constitutional proceedings.

Under Articles 9 of the Treaty on European Union (TUE) and 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFUE), anyone who holds the citizenship of an EU member state is automatically a citizen of the European Union, with all the associated rights: free movement, residence, voting in European elections, and consular protection. The loss of Italian citizenship therefore means the automatic loss of EU citizenship and all its attendant rights.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has developed a substantial body of case law holding that EU member states must respect EU law when exercising their competence over citizenship, particularly the principle of proportionality. In the landmark cases of Rottmann (C-135/08, 2010), Tjebbes (C-221/17, 2019), and the Danish citizenship case (C-689/21, 2023), the CJEU has consistently held that:

D.L. 36/2025 operates through a blanket, categorical mechanism with no individualized assessment. It applies the same treatment to every person regardless of their ties to Italy, their EU citizenship status, or their personal circumstances. Whether this mechanism can survive scrutiny under EU proportionality principles is a question that any Italian judge retains the independent power to refer to the CJEU under Article 267 TFUE. This avenue of challenge is entirely separate from the proceedings before the Italian Constitutional Court and remains fully available regardless of how the Italian domestic proceedings resolve.

Key Dates Ahead

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Constitutional Court uphold D.L. 36/2025?

The Court declared the specific questions raised by the Tribunal of Turin partly unfounded and partly inadmissible. However, the full written reasoning has not been published, and several broader challenges (from Campobasso and Mantova, raising additional constitutional arguments not present in the Turin referral) remain pending. The March 12 press release addressed only one of several pending referrals.

Is it still possible to apply for Italian citizenship by descent?

The legal landscape is actively evolving. Several court proceedings are challenging the retroactive application of the new law, and binding rulings from the Court of Cassation and further Constitutional Court hearings are expected in the coming months. If you believe you may have a claim, it is important to seek qualified legal guidance as soon as possible to preserve your rights.

What is the “minor issue” (questione dei minori)?

The minor issue concerns whether children automatically lost Italian citizenship when their father naturalized in another country under Italy’s 1912 citizenship law (Legge 555/1912, Article 12). This affects a large proportion of descendants of Italian emigrants, particularly to the United States. The Sezioni Unite of the Court of Cassation will address this on April 14, 2026, and their ruling will be binding on all lower courts.

Does the March 12 press release affect cases filed before March 27, 2025?

No. The text of D.L. 36/2025 expressly provides that cases filed (whether administratively or judicially) before 23:59 on March 27, 2025 continue to be governed by the previous rules.

What is a “partial declaration of unconstitutionality”?

The Constitutional Court frequently strikes down only a portion of a law rather than the entire provision. In the citizenship context, this could mean upholding the generational limit as applied prospectively while striking down its retroactive application to people already born. The Tribunal of Torino specifically proposed this outcome, and it follows established constitutional jurisprudence including the Court’s landmark Sentenza 10/2015.

What does “inadmissible” mean in a Constitutional Court ruling?

“Inadmissible” (inammissibile) is a procedural determination, not a judgment on the merits. It typically means that the Court found a defect in the way the question was framed, that the referring judge did not adequately establish relevance, or that the remedy requested would require choices that belong to the legislature rather than the Court. An inadmissible question can be raised again in a differently framed referral.

Can the CJEU (European Court of Justice) intervene?

Yes. Any Italian judge can independently refer questions about D.L. 36/2025’s compatibility with EU law to the Court of Justice of the European Union under Article 267 TFUE. This avenue is entirely separate from the Italian constitutional proceedings and remains available regardless of domestic outcomes. The CJEU has established clear principles requiring individualized proportionality assessments before any loss of member state citizenship that would result in loss of EU citizenship.

This article is provided for informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Each client’s situation is unique and should be assessed individually by qualified legal counsel. PortaleItaly monitors these proceedings in real time and will publish updates as new developments emerge. Last updated: March 21, 2026.