Italy's Constitutional Court published an Italian citizenship referral to the EU Court of Justice on July 23, joining three pending challenges, sending the EU law question to Luxembourg and suspending the proceedings until an answer comes back.
Order 147/2026 settles nothing on the merits. It doesn't say whether the 2025 descent restriction breaches EU law or the Italian Constitution. For Americans whose claims rest on Italian citizenship by descent, it converts an Italian constitutional dispute into a European one and stops the domestic clock while Luxembourg reads the file.
What the order does
The Court joined three proceedings referred by the tribunals of Mantua and Campobasso, brought by a Brazilian minor, two Argentine citizens and two Brazilian citizens.
The referred question asks whether Article 9 of the Treaty on European Union and Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which make every national of a member state a citizen of the Union, permit Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992.
Article 3-bis took effect March 29, 2025, the day after Tajani's decree-law 36/2025 appeared in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, and Parliament rewrote parts of it when it passed Law 74/2025.
Anyone born abroad holding a second citizenship is treated as never having acquired Italian citizenship, including people born decades before the text existed. Five exceptions survive conversion:
recognition following a documented application filed with the competent consulate or mayor by 11:59 p.m. Rome time on March 27, 2025
recognition following a documented application filed on the date of an appointment the competent office had communicated to the applicant by that same deadline
judicial recognition following a court application filed by that same deadline
a first- or second-degree ascendant who holds, or held at death, Italian citizenship and no other
a parent or adoptive parent who lived in Italy for two continuous years after acquiring Italian citizenship and before the child's birth or adoption
The appointment exception is narrower than it reads. Requesting a consular slot doesn't qualify. The office had to have communicated the appointment before the cutoff, and the application had to follow on the day it set.
No American claimant is in the referred cases
All three proceedings come out of South America, where the Italian-descended population is largest. Italian courts hearing American claims will have to follow whatever interpretation the Court of Justice gives, though outcomes will still turn on each case's facts, posture and whether an exception applies.
Written observations in a preliminary reference come from the parties, member state governments and the European Commission. Italy defended the provision in the domestic proceedings and is entitled to file in Luxembourg.
Americans have no collective representative there, and the US government has no standing to file simply because Americans are affected.
How long does Luxembourg take?
References for a preliminary ruling took an average of 16.9 months in 2025, down from 17.2 months in 2024, the Court's judicial statistics show. Cases granted expedited treatment closed in 7.4 months, but expedited treatment has to be requested and granted.
The ruling then returns to the referring court, which applies it to the facts, so Mantua and Campobasso would decide after that. On the average timeline, an answer arrives in late 2027 and the Italian proceedings resume from there.
The American cohort the statistics miss
Eurostat recorded 824 acquisitions of Italian citizenship by US citizens in 2024, the highest figure in the series. That count covers only people usually resident in Italy.
A recognition issued by an Italian consulate in Chicago to someone living in Illinois doesn't enter it, and no agency maintains a consistent public series for US-resident consular and judicial recognitions. The harmonized data captures a slice of the American pipeline.
Sizing the rest is a matter of estimate, which is precisely why the reach of this referral is hard to quantify from public sources.
First residence permits issued by Italy to US citizens have fallen every year since 2021, and the residence route was slow before the descent route closed. The 2024 figures predate the restriction taking hold. Neither series shows yet where the pre-reform pipeline goes.
What the referral leaves standing
Order 147/2026 doesn't reopen judgment 63/2026, in which the Constitutional Court held that Article 3-bis blocks acquisition at the origin rather than stripping a status already held, and rejected the same EU law argument as unfounded.
The Court restated that reasoning on its way to Luxembourg. Two questions were not properly before it in these proceedings and stay unresolved: claimants who requested a consular or municipal appointment before the cutoff and never received one, and the reach of the exception for an ancestor who held Italian citizenship and nothing else.
Italy's new citizenship restrictions stay in force while the reference is pending. Article 3-bis is not suspended.
