The "Minor Issue" Is Finally Resolved: What Judgment No. 24045/2026 Means for Your Italian Citizenship Claim

For years, one of the most feared obstacles in Italian citizenship by descent cases had no clean answer: what happens to a minor's Italian citizenship when a parent naturalizes in another country while the child is still underage? Consulates, municipalities, and even Italian courts disagreed — and thousands of applications were denied or delayed because of it. Applicants call this the "minor issue," and it has quietly ended more citizenship claims than almost any other technicality in recent memory.

That uncertainty is now over.

What the Supreme Court decided

On 26 July 2026, the Joint Civil Sections of Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation (Sezioni Unite) issued Judgment No. 24045/2026, resolving a long-standing conflict over how to interpret Articles 7 and 12 of Law No. 555/1912 — the law that, until 1992, governed Italian citizenship.

The question was this: if a child was born abroad with dual citizenship from birth — Italian by descent (iure sanguinis) and, say, American or Brazilian by place of birth (ius soli) — and a parent later naturalized in that other country while the child was still a minor, did the child automatically lose Italian citizenship along with the parent?

The Court said no. It held that a child who already held Italian citizenship and a foreign citizenship simultaneously from birth keeps that Italian citizenship even after a parent's later naturalization abroad. The only way that citizenship can be lost is if the person, once they reach adulthood, formally and voluntarily renounces it.

In practical terms, the ruling restores an interpretation that had been applied for most of the last century, before a 2018 shift in case law and a 2024 ministerial circular introduced the restrictive reading that had been causing denials.

Why this matters for your case

If your citizenship application — or a family member's — was ever denied, delayed, or discouraged because an ancestor naturalized abroad while a parent in your line was still a child, this ruling directly addresses that obstacle. It does not automatically reopen every closed case (more on that in our next post about the Ministry's implementing circular), but it removes the legal uncertainty that consulates and courts had been citing.

The bigger picture
This decision doesn't touch the separate, more publicized 2025 reform (Law 74/2025) that limits how many generations back a citizenship claim can reach. That's a different legal question, currently under review by the Constitutional Court and, as of this summer, referred to the European Court of Justice — I cover that development in a separate post. The minor issue and the generational-limits reform are two distinct battlegrounds, and it's worth understanding which one actually applies to your family's situation before assuming either one closes the door.

If you're preparing or revisiting a jure sanguinis application, having your civil status documents — birth, marriage, naturalization, and death records — translated and sworn correctly for submission to a consulate, comune, or Italian court is still where most delays happen. That part of the process hasn't changed, ruling or no ruling.
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