On 28 March 2025, eight Venezuelan citizens filed a claim at the court in Turin asking to be recognised as Italian citizens by descent. They were one day late. The previous day, at 23:59 Rome time, the rules they were relying on had stopped applying to anyone who had not yet asked.
Their case went all the way to Italy's Constitutional Court. In judgment 63/2026, decided on 11 March 2026 and published on 30 April, the court declared the challenge unfounded. The new rule stands.
That single day says something most people with a grandparent from the old country would rather not hear. Citizenship by descent feels like an inheritance, something that was always yours and only needs paperwork. In law it is nothing of the kind. It is a policy, written by a parliament, and parliaments rewrite policies. The last eighteen months produced three clear examples, pointing in different directions, and together they show where the value of an ancestral claim actually lies.
Italy: a retroactive line drawn at a minute to midnight
Italy's 2025 reform came by emergency decree, decree-law no. 36 of 28 March 2025, later converted into Law no. 74 of 23 May 2025. It inserted a new article 3-bis into the citizenship law of 1992. The judgment recites its text in full, and the core is a legal fiction: a person born abroad, even before the new article took effect, who holds another citizenship, "is considered never to have acquired Italian citizenship", unless one of a short list of conditions applies.
The conditions are narrow:
- an application to a consulate or a mayor, with the necessary documents, filed no later than 23:59 Rome time on 27 March 2025, or an appointment for one communicated by that time;
- a court claim filed by the same minute;
- a parent or grandparent who holds, or held at death, only Italian citizenship;
- a parent who lived in Italy for at least two continuous years after becoming Italian and before the child's birth.
Two features are worth pausing on. The first is retroactivity. The rule does not only govern children born from now on. It reaches back over people born decades ago and treats them as never having been Italian. The second is the anchor date. What separated the protected from the excluded was not when they were born, nor how strong their family ties were, but whether they had filed by a particular minute.
The court accepted both. According to the judgment, the government's purpose was to require "vincoli effettivi con la Repubblica", effective ties with the Republic, so as to restore the link between people, sovereignty and territory. The court described democratic participation as rooted in "un legame effettivo tra i cittadini e la comunità nazionale", an effective bond between citizens and the national community. The State Attorney's submissions, recorded in the judgment, gave the background in numbers: Italians resident abroad and born abroad rose by 51 per cent between 2013 and 2024, from just under three million to just under four and a half million.
Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the lesson is clear. A claim that had existed for generations disappeared for everyone who had not yet turned it into a filed application.
Spain: a window that was always going to close
Spain offers the opposite construction with the same lesson. Its Law 20/2022 on Democratic Memory opened a route in its eighth additional provision: people born outside Spain to a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, who were originally Spanish and lost or gave up that nationality as a result of exile could opt for Spanish nationality, as could some other groups. It was never meant to be permanent. The law itself set a window of two years from its entry into force and allowed the Council of Ministers to extend it by one year.
On 22 October 2025 it closed. Spain's consulates and embassies published the same notice, among them the embassy in Panama: the appointment system stopped taking requests that day, and anyone who later presents documents must prove that they asked for an appointment within the deadline.
Nobody in Spain had to pass a new law to end the right. It ended because it had been written to end. Again the decisive act was not being a grandchild. It was asking in time.
Canada: a door reopened, with a new condition attached
Canada went the other way. Since 17 April 2009, according to IRCC, citizenship by descent had been limited to the first generation born abroad. In December 2023 an Ontario court found that limit unconstitutional for many people. After an interim measure in March 2025, Parliament passed Bill C-3, which came into force on 15 December 2025.
The government's announcement describes two regimes:
- People born abroad to a Canadian parent in the second or later generation before 15 December 2025 became citizens automatically under the new law. They can apply for proof of citizenship, and there is a simplified route to renounce if they do not want it.
- For people born or adopted abroad from 15 December 2025 to a Canadian parent who was also born abroad, citizenship passes only if that parent has a substantial connection to Canada: at least 1,095 days, three years, of cumulative physical presence in Canada before the child's birth or adoption.
This is generous to the past and conditional for the future. And the condition is a familiar one. Italy's surviving routes include a parent who lived in Italy for two years. Canada's future route requires a parent who spent three years in Canada. Two countries moving in opposite directions arrived at the same idea: descent alone is no longer enough; presence counts.
What the three cases have in common
Put side by side, the three countries look inconsistent. One closed, one let a window expire, one reopened. But they share three features that matter far more to a family than the direction of any single reform.
First, the legislature owns the rule. None of these rights was protected from change by the fact that it was old. Italy's had been in place for more than a century and was removed by decree. Spain's was created with an end date. Canada's was restricted in 2009 and widened in 2025. Citizenship by descent is as durable as the majority that last voted on it. The Brief made a related point about naturalisation in its piece on Argentina's citizenship decree and the courts: the route to a passport is a political object, and it moves.
Second, the date that decides is the date of the file. In Italy the protected group was defined by an application time-stamp. In Spain it was defined by an appointment request. Even in Canada, the generous rule applies by date of birth relative to 15 December 2025, and proof still has to be applied for. In each case, the people with documents already lodged were in a different legal position from the people who had merely meant to get round to it.
Third, the trend is toward an effective link. The Italian court's language of an "effective bond", Canada's 1,095 days and Italy's two years of parental residence all express the same idea. A passport is increasingly meant to describe a real connection, not a genealogical one. That fits a wider pattern the Brief has followed in language requirements for residency and citizenship: states are asking for more evidence that a citizen belongs.
What follows from this, practically
None of this is advice to rush into any particular application. It is an argument about where the value of an ancestral claim sits. If descent rights are policies, then a claim has three possible states, and they are not equally safe.
- Recognised: citizenship confirmed, a passport issued, the children registered. The decree's own exceptions keep the old rules for anyone who had applied, had an appointment or had sued by the cut-off, and the court held that transitional rules of that kind are within the legislature's discretion.
- Filed: an application lodged, an appointment requested, a court claim issued. In Italy and Spain this is the line that decided who kept access.
- Possible: a grandparent's birth certificate in a drawer and an intention to deal with it later. This is the state that both Italy and Spain extinguished without notice in Italy's case and with notice in Spain's.
The difference between the last two is usually a few hundred euros of certified documents and a few months of patience. The difference in outcome, as the eight Venezuelans found, can be total.
There is a second consequence for families who already hold a second citizenship by descent. The new conditions bite on the next generation. Under Canada's rules a parent born abroad who has not spent 1,095 days in Canada cannot pass on citizenship to a child born after 15 December 2025. Under Italy's surviving routes, a parent's two years of residence in Italy before the child's birth is one of the few ways through. If a family wants the passport to survive one more generation, the time to think about that is before the children are born, not when they turn eighteen. The Brief's piece on the two-passport family looks at that planning from the household's side.
The inheritance that is actually inherited
The romantic view of citizenship by descent is that the state recognises something that was always true: that you are, in some deep sense, Italian, Spanish or Canadian because your grandparents were. The legal view is narrower. The state recognises what its current statute says, for the people who have asked by the time it asks the question.
That is not an argument against using these routes. Where they remain open they are still among the most valuable options a family can hold, which is why they featured in the Brief's overview of second passport strategies in 2026, and why the Italy country page still draws readers with Italian ancestry. It is an argument for treating them as what they are: time-limited offers from a government, which can be withdrawn by the same means that created them.
What a family really inherits is not the passport. It is the chance to apply for one under today's rules. That chance does not keep.
Work with Sebastian
If your family holds, or might hold, a citizenship claim through descent and you want to understand where it stands and how it fits with residence, tax and the next generation, that is the kind of cross-border question Sebastian works on with internationally mobile clients. Book a consultation.
