Less than two weeks after the Italian Constitutional Court upheld the law restricting citizenship. jus sanguinisA Brazilian lawyer specializing in International Law states that the situation has changed. According to the lawyer... Rui Badaro, PhD in International Law and visiting professor at University of Triestein northern Italy, the sentence No. 13818/2026 of the Supreme Court of Cassazione, published last Thursday (14), represents a concrete turning point: “those who work in International/Constitutional Law, in matters of citizenship, have a new weapon. And they have a technical duty to use it.”
The statement is not rhetorical. The Supreme Court's decision created a new legal category, the prejudizio a monteThis equates the inability to schedule a consular appointment to the formal rejection of an application. In practice, this means that a descendant stuck in a waiting list can directly resort to the courts without having to prove that they exhausted administrative remedies beforehand.
What has changed and why?
The scenario preceding the decision is familiar to thousands of Brazilians. On April 30th, the Constitutional Court, in what is known as the Consultation, approved Law 74/2025. (Tajani Decree)which introduced a time limit on the recognition of citizenship by descent. For Badaró, that decision operated a "material constitutional reform without formal constitutional reform," and that is what led him to write, days before, that the jus sanguinis He had died.
The Supreme Court's ruling does not undo this blow. But it opens another path. "Where the Consultation closed the substantive door, the Cassation opened the procedural window," writes the jurist.
The new legal category
The case that led to the decision involves descendants of an Italian born in 1818 who emigrated to Colombia. In September 2022, they filed a lawsuit before the Court of Genoa because the Italian embassy in Bogotá had suspended appointments indefinitely. The official website itself stated: "Currently, there is still no date scheduled for the resumption of these appointments."
The Supreme Court responded clearly: obstruction of entry is as serious as denial of exit. And it established a binding principle for all lower courts, that the interest in bringing an action "persists not only in cases of refusal or delay, but also when there are impediments that do not even allow the request to be submitted to the Administration."
Badaró also points out that the Supreme Court It reaffirmed the classic structure of the right by descent, defining that the consular authority exercises a "funzione meramente accertativa" — a declaratory, not constitutive, function — and that the right to citizenship "è permanente ed imprescripttibile": that is, it exists from birth and does not expire.
What to do now
The jurist, who published an analysis on the subject in CounselThe report indicates that the decision directly affects Italian consulates in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre. The necessary proof is the blocking itself: screenshots of attempts on the Prenot@mi system, unanswered emails, and public statements of suspension on consular websites.
"The corpse breathes," concludes Badaró, referring to... jus sanguinis which the Consultation declared buried less than two weeks ago.
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