Italian nationality law


The primary law governing nationality of Italy is Law 91/1992, which came into force on 16 August 1992. Italy is a member state of the European Union, and all Italian nationals are EU citizens. They are entitled to free movement rights in EU and European Free Trade Association countries, and may vote in elections to the European Parliament.

Terminology

The distinction between citizenship and nationality is not always clear in the English language and differs by country. Generally, nationality refers to a person's legal belonging to a sovereign state and is the common term used in international treaties when addressing members of a country, while citizenship usually means the set of rights and duties a person has in that nation.
In Italian, the term "citizenship" refers to membership in a political community while "nationality" can indicate a person's belonging to an ethnic or cultural group. While both terms are used in legislation when dealing with national status, "citizenship" is used more frequently.

History

Italian unification

Before Italian unification in the mid-19th century, the Italian peninsula was divided between several Italian monarchies, the Papal States, and the Austrian Empire. The Kingdom of Sardinia partially unified the region and proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, before fully unifying the peninsula with the capture of Rome in 1870.
Prior to unification, the Kingdom of Sardinia adopted the Statuto Albertino as its constitution in 1848. This piece of legislation established a basic set of political rights for male citizens, including the right to vote in elections and eligibility for public office. Under this statute, children of Sardinian fathers born overseas were Sardinian subjects. Male children who were Sardinian subjects by birth were required to return to the kingdom within three years of reaching the age of majority to fulfill a mandatory military service requirement in order to retain their Sardinian status. Foreigners could naturalise as Sardinian subjects by application to the sovereign, and foreign women who married Sardinian men automatically acquired subject status at the time of their marriage. Children born in state territory to foreign parents permanently domiciled in the kingdom were considered to be subjects by birth.
Although the law addressed acquisition and loss of subject status for cases involving foreign residence or marriage, it lacked a definition for who held Sardinian citizenship at the time of the law's adoption and instead assumed that virtually all of the population were naturally members of the state. Following the Italian kingdom's proclamation in 1861, a new Civil Code was enacted in 1865 that included provisions clarifying Italian citizenship acquisition. This legislation codified jus sanguinis as the primary basis through which citizenship is acquired; any individual born to an Italian father automatically acquired Italian citizenship by descent.

Law no. 555 of 1912

On 13 June 1912, Law number 555, concerning citizenship, was passed, and it took effect on 1 July 1912.
Despite the fact that the Statuto Albertino did not make any reference to equality or inequality between the sexes, the precept of the wife's subordination to the husband—one having ancient antecedents—was prevalent in the basic legal system. There are numerous examples in the codified law, such as article 144 of the Civil Code of 1939 and, specifically, law number 555 of 13 June 1912 "On Italian Citizenship". Law 555 established the primacy of the husband in the marriage and the subordination of the wife and the children to his events pertinent to his citizenship. It established:
  • That jus sanguinis was the guiding principle, and that jus soli was an ancillary possibility.
  • The children followed the citizenship of the father, and only in certain cases, the citizenship of the mother. The mother could transmit the citizenship to her children born before 1 January 1948 only in the special cases found in paragraph 2 of article 1 of this statute: These cases arose if the father was unknown, if he was stateless, or if the children could not share the father's foreign citizenship according to the law of his county. In this last situation, the Ministry of the Interior holds that if the child received jus soli citizenship of the foreign country where he was born, the mother's Italian citizenship did not pass to the child, just as in situations where the child received the father's citizenship by jus sanguinis.
  • Women lost their original Italian citizenship if they married a foreign husband whose country's laws gave its citizenship to the wife, as a direct and immediate effect of the marriage. .

    Dual citizenship under law no. 555 of 1912

Of central importance for the diaspora of Italians in many countries, as it relates to the holding of Italian citizenship alongside another citizenship, is article 7 of law number 555 of 1912. The provisions of this article gave immunity to some living Italian children from the citizenship events of their fathers. If the child was born to an Italian father in a jus soli country, the child was born with the Italian citizenship of the father and also with the citizenship of the country where he or she was born. That is to say that the child was born as a dual citizen. Children born with dual citizenship in this form were allowed to maintain their dual status in case the father naturalised later, thus parting with his Italian citizenship. Moreover, Italy has not imposed limitations on the number of generations of its citizens who might be born outside Italy, even as holders of citizenship foreign to Italy.
Article 7 reads:
"Except in the case of special provisions to be stipulated by international treaties, an Italian citizen born and residing in a foreign nation, which considers him to be a citizen of its own by birth, still retains Italian citizenship, but he may abandon it when he becomes of age or emancipated."
Since Italian laws in this time were very sensitive to gender, it remains to be stated that the benefit of article 7 was extended to both male and female children. A girl of minor age could keep her Italian citizenship in accordance with article 7 after the naturalisation of her father—but she still might not be able to pass her own citizenship to her children, particularly if they were born before 1948.
Law 555 of 1912 contains a provision causing the Italian children of Italian widows to retain their Italian citizenship if the widow should acquire a new citizenship by remarrying, to be found in article 12. The children concerned could keep their Italian citizenship even if they received a new one by derivation from the mother when the remarriage occurred.
Foreign women contracting marriage with Italian men before 27 April 1983 automatically became Italian citizens. If a woman's acquisition of Italian citizenship by marriage did not produce an effect upon the woman's citizenship in her country of origin, she was therefore a dual citizen. Article 10 of law 555 of 1912 provided that a married woman could not assume a citizenship different from that of her husband. If an Italian woman acquired a new citizenship while her husband remained Italian, she was a dual citizen, and law 555 of 1912 was not cognisant of her new status in the state where she acquired citizenship during her marriage.

Loss of Italian citizenship under law no. 555 of 1912

Italian citizenship could be lost:
  • By a man or woman, being of competent legal age, who of his or her own volition naturalised in another country and resided outside of Italy. Italian citizen women married to Italian citizen husbands could not lose their citizenship if the husband's Italian citizenship was retained.
  • By the minor and unemancipated child—without the immunities from loss to be found in articles 7 and 12 —who, residing outside of Italy, held a non-Italian citizenship and lived with a father whose Italian citizenship was also lost.
  • By the woman whose Italian citizenship was a consequence of marriage to an Italian citizen, if upon becoming widowed or divorced, she returned to the country of her origin to live there as a citizen. This scenario of loss was possible only before the date 27 April 1983.
  • By the citizen who accepted employment with or rendered military service to a foreign state, and was expressly ordered by the Italian government to abandon this activity before a deadline, and still persisted in it after the said deadline. This kind of loss was rather uncommon, and could only occur if the Italian government contacted the citizen whose abandonment of service to a foreign government was demanded.
Loss of Italian citizenship carried with it the inability to pass Italian citizenship automatically to children born during the period of not holding the citizenship. Still, Italian citizenship could sometimes be acquired by children of former citizens reacquiring the citizenship. Because law 555 of 1912 underwent revision to meet the republican constitution's requirement that the sexes be equal before the law, a determination of citizenship for a child involves an analysis of the events of both parents and possibly the ascendants of both.

The 1948 Constitution of the Republic

The constitution of the Italian Republic entered into effect on 1 January 1948. With the Salerno Pact in April 1944, stipulated between the National Liberation Committee and the Monarchy, the referendum on being governed by a monarchy or a republic was postponed until the end of the war. The 1848 constitution of the Kingdom of Italy was still formally in force at this time, since the laws that had limited it were, to some extent, abolished on 25 July 1943. The referendum was held on 2 June 1946. All Italian men and women 21 years of age and older were called to vote on two ballots: one of these being the Institutional Referendum on the choice between a monarchy and a republic, the other being for the delegation of 556 deputies to the Constituent Assembly.
The current Italian constitution was approved by the Constituent Assembly on 22 December 1947, published in the Official Gazette on 27 December 1947, and entered into effect on 1 January 1948. The original text has undergone parliamentary revisions.
A Democratic Republic was instituted, based on the deliberations and sovereignty of the people. Individual rights were recognised, as well as those of the body public, whose basis was the fulfilment of binding obligations of political, economic, and social solidarity.
The fundamental articles that were eventually used to support new arguments concerning citizenship are as follows:
Article 3, a part of the constitution's "Fundamental Principles", has two clauses.
  • The first clause establishes the equality of all citizens: "All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, personal and social conditions."
  • The second clause, supplementary to the first and no less important, adds: "It is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic and social nature which, really limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, impede the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organisation of the country."
Article 29, under Title II, "Ethical and Social Relations", reads: "The Republic recognises the rights of the family as a natural society founded on matrimony." The second clause establishes the equality between spouses: "Matrimony is based on the moral and legal equality of the spouses within the limits laid down by law to guarantee the unity of the family."
Another article of fundamental importance here is article 136, under Title VI, "Constitutional Guarantees - Section I - The Constitutional Court", reading as follows: "When the Court declares the constitutional illegitimacy of a law or enactment having the force of law, the law ceases to have effect from the day following the publication of the decision." Moreover, relating to this article, still with pertinence to citizenship, the second clause is very important: "The decision of the Court shall be published and communicated to the Houses and to the regional councils concerned, so that, wherever they deem it necessary, they shall act in conformity with constitutional procedures."