The “Minor Issue” Is Over: Italy’s Supreme Court Delivers a Landmark Victory for Italian Citizenship by Descent (United Sections, Judgment No. 24045/2026)

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Disclaimer: This article provides general information about a recent judicial development and does not constitute legal advice. The application of judgment no. 24045/2026 to any individual situation depends on the specific facts and procedural posture of each case. Post-reform judicial strategies described above involve arguments whose outcome cannot be guaranteed.

On July 26, 2026, the United Sections of the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation — the highest and most authoritative formation of Italy’s supreme civil court — published judgment no. 24045/2026. With this decision, the Court resolved, once and for all, the question that has haunted Italian citizenship by descent cases for the past two years: the so-called “minor issue.”

The outcome could not be clearer, and it could not be better for descendants of Italian emigrants: a child who was an Italian citizen by descent (iure sanguinis) and a foreign citizen by birthplace (iure soli) from the moment of birth did not lose Italian citizenship when a parent later naturalized abroad. Under Article 7 of Law no. 555 of 1912, that dual citizenship from birth could be lost in only one way: by a voluntary, express renunciation made by the person themselves, as an adult.

This is not a technical adjustment. It is the restoration of more than a century of consistent legal interpretation, delivered by nine of Italy’s most senior judges, with the full support of the Prosecutor General’s office. For thousands of families whose cases were rejected, suspended, or discouraged since 2023, the landscape has just changed fundamentally.

In this article I will explain what the “minor issue” was, what the United Sections actually decided, who benefits immediately — including families with 1948 cases — and why, in my professional assessment, this judgment also creates serious legal arguments for those who still need to file a claim today, after the 2025 “Tajani” reform.

What Was the “Minor Issue”?

For over a hundred years, Italian consulates, municipalities, and courts applied a settled rule. If your ancestor was born in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, or any other country granting citizenship by birthplace, that ancestor was a dual citizen from birth: Italian through their Italian parent, and American (or Brazilian, Argentine, Venezuelan) through the soil. If the Italian parent later naturalized while the child was still a minor, the child kept Italian citizenship. Article 7 of Law 555/1912 protected the dual citizen from birth; only a voluntary renunciation in adulthood could sever the Italian line.

Beginning in 2023, a new line of case law (Cassation decisions no. 17161/2023, no. 454/2024 and no. 3564/2024) upended this settled understanding. These decisions held that Article 12, paragraph 2, of the same 1912 law — a provision about minors who become foreigners as a consequence of their parent’s loss of citizenship — also applied to children who had been dual citizens from birth. The consequence was devastating: the parent’s naturalization was deemed to have “dragged” the minor child out of Italian citizenship, breaking the line of transmission for every generation that followed.

In October 2024, the Ministry of the Interior instructed administrative offices to apply this restrictive reading as well. Court cases were rejected. Others were suspended. Countless families were told that a line they had documented for years was, suddenly, legally dead.

The conflict between the two readings of the law was so profound that the First Civil Section of the Supreme Court referred the question to the United Sections — the formation that speaks with the Court’s most authoritative voice — as a matter of exceptional importance. The public hearing took place on April 14, 2026. The judgment was published on July 26, 2026.

What the United Sections Decided

The case before the Court involved descendants of an Italian woman born in the province of Belluno in 1923, who emigrated to Venezuela and naturalized there in 1954, when her son — born an Italian citizen in 1946, and a Venezuelan citizen by birth — was still a minor. Both the Tribunal of Rome and the Rome Court of Appeal had rejected the family’s claim on the basis of the new restrictive case law. The United Sections overturned the appellate judgment and sent the case back to be decided according to principles that now bind the entire system.

The Court’s reasoning rests on four pillars.

First, the letter and structure of the law. Article 12, paragraph 2, applies to minors who, sharing residence with the parent who loses Italian citizenship, “acquistino” — acquire, in the present subjunctive — a foreign citizenship. The verb tense matters: it refers to a foreign citizenship that comes into existence at the moment of, and as a consequence of, the parent’s loss. A child who has held the foreign citizenship since birth, as an original acquisition, simply does not fall within this provision. Article 12 concerns only the minor who, at the moment of the parent’s loss, held exclusively Italian citizenship and risked statelessness. The dual citizen from birth is governed — autonomously and exhaustively, in the Court’s words — by Article 7.

Second, history. The Court went back to the parliamentary record of 1910–1912: the Senate report by Vittorio Polacco and the Chamber report by the Hon. Baccelli. The 1912 legislator deliberately chose an “opting out” model: the dual citizen from birth keeps Italian citizenship unless he or she expressly renounces it as an adult. The opposite “opting in” model — automatic loss unless the citizen declared the will to keep it — was proposed, debated, and defeated. The Constitutional Court itself, in judgment no. 63/2026, had already reconstructed this history in identical terms.

Third, a century of official practice. The Council of State said it in formal opinions in 1975 and 1990. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it in its circulars, including circular no. 9 of July 4, 2001. The public administration applied it for over a hundred years, recognizing citizenship “independently of the parents’ subsequent naturalization in a foreign State.” The United Sections observed that the thesis it was endorsing had been supported “in unison” by the applicants’ defense, by the Prosecutor General, by legal scholarship, and by the public administration throughout the twentieth century. The 2023–2024 case law was the anomaly; judgment no. 24045/2026 is the correction.

Fourth, fundamental rights. The Court expressly declared its intention to give “total continuity” to the principles established by the United Sections in the landmark twin judgments nos. 25317 and 25318 of 2022: citizenship by birth is acquired at the moment of birth, as an original acquisition (a titolo originario), by operation of law; the status of citizen, once acquired, is permanent, imprescriptible, and enforceable in court at any time; provisions on the loss of citizenship must be interpreted restrictively, because citizenship is a fundamental right protected by the Italian Constitution (including Article 22), by Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and by the Treaty of Lisbon; and loss can occur only through a voluntary and explicit renunciation — never a tacit one, and never as an automatic side effect of someone else’s choices.

The Four Binding Principles

For the judge on remand — and, in practice, for every court in Italy dealing with these cases — the United Sections spelled out four principles:

1. The new Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992 (the 2025 “Tajani” reform) does not apply to judicial claims filed before March 27, 2025, which remain governed by the previous legislation — as the legislator itself provided and as the Constitutional Court confirmed in judgments no. 142/2025 and no. 63/2026.
2. Under Article 7 of Law 555/1912, the minor born abroad to an Italian father or mother, in a country attributing citizenship by birthplace, is a “dual citizen by law from birth” and keeps Italian citizenship even if the Italian parent naturalizes or otherwise loses citizenship — unless an international treaty provides otherwise, or the person, once an adult, formally renounces.
3. Under Article 12, only the minor who held exclusively Italian citizenship could be affected by the parent’s loss.
4. The full equalization of mothers and fathers, following Constitutional Court judgments no. 87/1975 and no. 30/1983, applies not only to the transmission of citizenship at birth, but also to the consequences of a parent’s loss of citizenship.

Who Benefits Immediately

Families with pending court cases involving a “minor issue.” If your case is currently before an Italian tribunal or court of appeal and the line involves an ancestor’s naturalization while a child was a minor, this judgment is the authority your case has been waiting for. In our own practice, we are filing supplementary briefs attaching judgment no. 24045/2026 in every pending matter with this profile. While the ruling is formally binding on the specific case it decided, decisions of the United Sections carry decisive nomophylactic authority: a simple section of the Cassation cannot depart from them, and lower courts follow them.

Families whose cases were recently rejected. If your claim was dismissed on “minor issue” grounds and the deadline to appeal has not expired, an appeal now stands on the strongest possible foundation. Time limits in Italian civil procedure are strict — this is a situation to assess immediately, not in a few months.

Everyone who filed a judicial claim before March 27, 2025. The Court confirmed, as its very first principle, that the 2025 reform does not touch these cases: they are decided under the law as it stood — which now, authoritatively, includes the resolution of the minor issue in your favor.

Why This Matters for 1948 Cases Too

Here is a point many commentaries have missed. The “minor issue” was never only a problem for male lines. A very large share of 1948 cases — claims through a female ancestor, which must be brought in court because of the historical discrimination against women corrected by the Constitutional Court in 1975 and 1983 — involve exactly the same factual pattern: an Italian-born woman who emigrated, married, and naturalized abroad while her children were minors. The very case decided by the United Sections was a maternal-line case.

Under the 2023–2024 restrictive case law, these families faced a double battle: first establishing transmission through the mother, then defending against the argument that her naturalization severed the line anyway. Judgment no. 24045/2026 dismantles the second obstacle entirely — and its fourth principle goes further, holding that the constitutional equalization of mother and father governs the consequences of loss as well. If you have a 1948 case, pending or in preparation, in which the mother (or any ancestor in the line) naturalized while a child was a minor, this judgment directly strengthens your claim.

The Bigger Door: What This Means for Those Who Must File Today, After the Tajani Reform

Now to the question I am asked most often since the reform of 2025: “I never filed. Is there anything left for me?”

Let me first be transparent about the limits. Judgment no. 24045/2026 decided a case filed before March 27, 2025, and the Court expressly stated that it was ruling without regard to the new Article 3-bis, which did not apply to that case. This judgment therefore does not directly decide the position of those who file after the reform, it does not reopen the consular and administrative route, and it does not remove the reform’s generational limits. Anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling.

And yet — precisely because of how the United Sections reasoned — this judgment materially strengthens the judicial arguments available to those born before the reform. Here is why.

The Court did not merely resolve a conflict between two articles of a 1912 statute. It reaffirmed, in 2026, with full knowledge of the Tajani reform and after the Constitutional Court’s judgment no. 63/2026, the doctrinal foundation laid by the United Sections in 2022: Italian citizenship by descent is acquired at birth, by operation of law, as an original acquisition. The status arises the moment the person is born to an Italian citizen. It is permanent. It is imprescriptible. It is enforceable in court at any time. A court that recognizes it does not grant citizenship — it declares a status that already exists, with effect from birth.

Follow that logic one step further, and the significance for post-reform filings becomes apparent. If the status of citizen arises at birth — not when a consulate processes a file, and not when a court issues a ruling — then a person born before March 27, 2025, under the law then in force, already holds the status of Italian citizen according to the very principles the Supreme Court has now twice proclaimed at its highest level. What such a person seeks from a court is a declaratory judgment, not a constitutive one. On this construction, the new law’s fiction — that such a person “is deemed never to have acquired” Italian citizenship — does not regulate a future acquisition at all: it purports to extinguish, retroactively, a fundamental status that the legal system itself says was already acquired. That is a fundamentally different, and far more vulnerable, kind of provision — one that raises serious questions under the Italian Constitution (which protects citizenship as a fundamental right and prohibits its deprivation for political reasons) and under European Union law, where the Constitutional Court itself has already referred aspects of the 2025 reform to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

I want to be precise about the status of this reasoning: these are arguments to be made and tested in court, not established results. The battle for those filing after March 27, 2025 will run through constitutional challenges and through Luxembourg, and no serious lawyer can promise its outcome or its timeline. But there is a real difference between filing a claim into a void and filing a claim armed with two sets of United Sections judgments — 2022 and now 2026 — declaring that your citizenship arose at birth and that the status is permanent and enforceable “at any time.” As of July 26, 2026, the legal footholds for a strong judicial claim by anyone born before March 27, 2025 are clearer and firmer than they have ever been since the reform. In our practice, we are already building these principles into the structure of new judicial claims: framed as declaratory actions over a pre-existing status, supported by targeted constitutional and EU-law challenges to the retroactive fiction.

What This Judgment Does Not Do

For completeness, and because honesty is the basis of any serious professional relationship: judgment no. 24045/2026 does not reopen the administrative (consular or municipal) route for those who never applied; it does not eliminate the two-generation limit introduced by Law 74/2025 for post-reform situations; and it does not guarantee the outcome of post-reform judicial claims, which remain a developing battleground. What it does — restore the minor issue to its century-old solution for all cases governed by the previous law, and reaffirm the birth-acquisition doctrine at the highest level — is more than enough to call it what it is: a landmark.

What You Should Do Now

If you have a pending case with a minor-issue profile, make sure your lawyers file the judgment into the record without delay. If your case was recently rejected, have the appeal deadlines checked immediately. If you have a 1948 case in preparation, this ruling belongs in it. And if you were born before March 27, 2025 and never filed, this is the moment to have your line professionally assessed: the facts of your family’s history — dates of birth, naturalization records, minor children in the line — now interact with a much more favorable body of supreme-court doctrine than existed even a month ago.

Our firm has litigated the minor issue across Italian tribunals and courts of appeal, and we have pending appeals and constitutional challenges built precisely on the questions this judgment addresses. If you would like an assessment of your case in light of judgment no. 24045/2026, write to us