The Italian law number 91 of February 5, 1992 provides that any foreigner who has direct ancestry from an Italian is also an Italian citizen and consequently has the right to apply for Italian citizenship.
There are some ways to make this request, like as the competent Italian consulate in the country of residence or also by going to Italy and making the request directly at the Comune in Italy, always presenting all the complete documentation that proves the descendence.
But, what many people are unaware is that there is a third way to recognize the Italian citizenship: via court.
The judicial process for obtaining Italian citizenship arose because in consulates such as São Paulo in Brazil, for example, the waiting list to obtain Italian Citizenship is more than 10 years, therefore, the Italian Courts understood that all this delay is contrary to article 3 of Presidential Decree 362/1994, which sets the deadline for defining the citizenship procedure at two years.
In addition, this year the Italian Government announced a series of measures to modernise and reduce administrative bureaucracy – the so-called “Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza”, or ‘National Plan for Recovery and Resilience’, which favoured all judicial processes, making them faster and consequently citizenship processes will also be completed more quickly.
Especially for Italian citizenship, the most significant change that occurred was the change of competence to propose the actions, because before June 2022 all actions were proposed in Rome, and now is being proposed in the Court of the capital city of the region in which the Italian ancestor was born (“Capoluogo regionale”) so more courts became competent to judge expanding the number of cases to be judged.
Among all the benefits of Italian citizenship via court already described, we can also highlight that in a single process it is possible that the family groups with descent from the same Italian be recognized, making the process, in addition to more economical.
Therefore, the process of Italian citizenship through the courts has been improved and emerges as an alternative for those who cannot leave their country to go to Italy and also do not want to wait years in line at the consulate to have their right recognized.
