On June 9, 2026, the Constitutional Court held a public hearing on three referral orders challenging Article 3-bis of Law 74/2025 — the provision at the heart of the Tajani reform. The hearing was presided over by Court President Giovanni Amoroso, with Prof. Giovanni Pitruzzella as reporting judge. I attended in person.
Many had assumed that Italian Constitutional Court Judgment No. 63/2026, issued on April 30, had settled the constitutional question. It had not. That ruling validated the legislature’s power to limit iure sanguinis transmission going forward — but deliberately left open the harder question: can those limits apply retroactively to people who were already Italian citizens under the previous law? That is what the Court was asked to address on June 9.”
Why this hearing matters — even after Judgment No. 63
When the Constitutional Court upheld the core of the citizenship reform on April 30, 2026, many commentators called it game over. It was not. Judgment No. 63 validated the legislature’s power to limit iure sanguinis transmission going forward. What it did not address — and explicitly flagged as unresolved — was whether and how those limits can apply retroactively to people who were already Italian citizens under the previous law.
Three referral orders brought that unresolved question back to the Court: one from the Tribunal of Mantua (No. 4/2026), concerning a minor born Italian under the prior rules, and two from the Tribunal of Campobasso (No. 40/2026 and No. 41/2026), concerning Argentine applicants who had been blocked by consular waiting lists before the reform cut off their path. The presiding judge was Court President Giovanni Amoroso; the reporting judge was Prof. Giovanni Pitruzzella.
The arguments — one by one
Can a child born Italian lose citizenship without ever having exercised it?
Attorney Alfonso Celotto opened for the applicants in the Mantua case, representing the parents of Arthur Vincenzo De Lucca — a minor who was born an Italian citizen under the legislation in force at the time of his birth. Celotto’s core argument: the registration of a birth certificate is a declaratory act, not a constitutive one. The citizenship existed before any administrative procedure. The reform did not create it; it cannot extinguish it.
The constitutional anchor is Article 22, which prohibits the automatic deprivation of citizenship for political or administrative reasons. Applying the reform retroactively to a child who was already Italian at birth — and who never had the opportunity to exercise that citizenship precisely because he is still a minor — amounts to exactly that kind of automatic mass revocation.
Celotto also drew the Court’s attention to a very recent development: Cassation Order No. 13818, issued on May 12, 2026, just three weeks before the hearing. The Supreme Court had reaffirmed in that order that citizenship iure sanguinis is a primary subjective right of constitutional standing — a finding that, in Celotto’s submission, makes the reform’s retroactive effect even more difficult to justify in the case of a minor.
“We find ourselves facing a kind of automatic mass revocation of citizenship, which has left an entire series of interests, legitimate expectations, and rights entirely unresolved.”
Press releases, EU job offers, and a question the Court could not answer
Representing Argentine applicants in the Campobasso referral, Attorney Mellone opened with a pointed criticism of the Court itself: its practice of announcing outcomes through press releases — the Judgment No. 63 outcome was telegraphed on March 12, 2026, nearly seven weeks before the reasoning was published — forces lower courts and litigants to align with a result they cannot read, analyze, or contest.
Mellone also asked the Court to suspend the proceedings and wait for the Sezioni Unite of the Corte di Cassazione, already seized of three related appeals discussed on April 14, 2026. He concluded with a question that produced the loudest of the three gallery ovations: do the judges of the Italian Constitutional Court know, personally and individually, every one of the millions of Italian citizens living abroad? Can they state with certainty that none of those people have any genuine link to Italy? He did not think so, and he did not think the Court could either.
The defense formally placed on record a reservation to bring a complaint before the European Court of Human Rights, citing violations of Articles 6 and 8 of the ECHR — the right to a fair trial, and the right to respect for private life.
Consular backlogs as a denial of justice
Attorney Monica Lis Restanio, arguing the Campobasso No. 41 referral, took on the theoretical question that underlies the entire reform: is citizenship iure sanguinis a right that exists from birth, or does it only become real once administratively recognized?
Judgment No. 63 had implied the latter — that citizenship held by Italians abroad is a “virtual” or “imperfect” status until formalized. Restanio disputed this with a detailed reconstruction of Italian parliamentary history, from the 1864 unification law through Vittorio Scialoja’s 1912 reform and the current Law 91/1992. In every iteration, the family bond — not administrative registration — was the defining criterion. Citizenship is born with its holder. It does not begin when a consulate stamps a document.
From that foundation, the consequences of the reform’s transitional clause become visible in a different light. If a person was already a rights-holder, and the State’s own consular inefficiencies made it impossible to exercise those rights, then the State cannot use those same inefficiencies as the selection criterion for who keeps citizenship and who does not. Cassation Order 13818/2026 had called this what it is: a denial of justice.
“An absolute right — part of the legal heritage of every Italian born abroad — has been reduced to a contingent or even virtual right, because it now depends on a subsequent administrative or judicial act of recognition.”
The safeguard clause and a proposed fix
Attorney Corrado Caruso focused his argument on the transitional clause itself. Under Law 74/2025, the reform’s restrictions do not apply to people who had obtained a consular appointment scheduled by March 27, 2025. The logic sounds fair in the abstract. In practice, Caruso argued, it is anything but: obtaining a Prenot@mi appointment in Argentina, or a consular slot in Brazil, was not a matter of diligence. It was a matter of luck. The waiting lists were not the applicants’ fault. Making their citizenship rights contingent on successfully navigating a broken system is arbitrary.
Judgment No. 63 had noted this specific inequality in treatment but declined to resolve it, because the Turin court that generated that referral had not raised the point. The Campobasso court did raise it. Caruso therefore asked the Court to issue an additive ruling: declare Article 3-bis unconstitutional insofar as it fails to protect anyone who formally expressed their intent to obtain citizenship recognition but was blocked by objective obstacles attributable to the public administration — regardless of whether they had managed to book an appointment.
Caruso also challenged the use of the decree-law mechanism for the reform. Article 77 of the Constitution limits emergency decrees to situations of extraordinary and unforeseeable necessity. The consular backlog was neither. It had been a chronic, well-documented crisis for years before the government acted. Using an emergency tool to implement a permanent structural overhaul of citizenship law, Caruso argued, was constitutionally improper — as the Court itself had confirmed in Judgment No. 220/2023.
The State’s defense: proportionality and the judicial path
State Attorney Lorenzo D’Ascia defended the reform on proportionality grounds. Article 3-bis does not break up families, he argued; it includes specific compensatory measures for minors and preserves the judicial route for anyone who wishes to pursue citizenship claims. On Cassation Order 13818/2026, D’Ascia argued that the order ruled on the previous legal framework and therefore cannot function as a constitutional benchmark for the new rules.
On the safeguard clause, his argument was direct: the judicial path to citizenship recognition was always available, was never subject to consular waiting lists, and could be initiated by anyone at any time before the reform cut-off. A diligent applicant who genuinely wanted to protect their position had a concrete avenue. The transitional clause, in that light, is proportionate.
What happens next — and what it means for your case
The June 9 hearing confirms what any careful reading of Judgment No. 63 already suggested: the constitutional story of the Tajani reform is not over. Three developments are now in play simultaneously, any one of which could meaningfully shift the legal landscape:
- The Sezioni Unite of the Corte di Cassazione are expected to rule on three pending appeals argued on April 14, 2026. Their interpretation of Article 3-bis — particularly on who qualifies for protection under the safeguard clause — may reframe the entire question before the Constitutional Court delivers its next judgment.
- If the Constitutional Court accepts Caruso’s additive petition, the safeguard clause could be extended to cover anyone who demonstrably tried to access the consular system before March 27, 2025 — not just those who succeeded in booking an appointment. That would be a significant expansion of protected positions.
- The ECHR reservation entered by Mellone, combined with the concrete EU employment case he presented, opens a parallel front entirely outside the Italian constitutional system. The EU dimension — free movement, the right to work across member states — is now formally in the record.
If you have an iure sanguinis case in progress — or are deciding whether to start one — this is not the moment to assume the door is closed. The legal picture is still moving, and what the courts decide in the next months will matter considerably.
