Italian Citizenship
The firm habitually practises in matters of Italian citizenship. It provides assistance, advice and advocacy in proceedings for the recognition of Italian citizenship iure sanguinis, handles administrative proceedings for the granting of citizenship by residence and marriage, and protects the rights of foreigners against the silence or denial of Italian citizenship.
With us, citizenship is treated at 360 degrees: in addition to legal actions for the recognition of citizenship iure sanguinis, we deal with administrative proceedings introduced by foreigners applying for citizenship by residence or by marriage. We also provide legal aid in disputes concerning the Public Administration's silence-infringement, when the citizenship application is not decided within the time limit set by law for the conclusion of the procedure, currently set at 24 months, extendable by the Public Administration up to a maximum of 36 months.
Considering both finalised and ongoing cases, the Firm, as of July 2024, can count more than 3,000 court casesconcerning the recognition of citizenship by descent from an Italian ancestor.
Our trials are either by maternal route (when there is a woman in the family tree whose descendant was born before 1948), or by paternal route, in order to counter the excessive queues at some Italian Consulates, which do not conclude the administrative procedure within the legal deadlines, thus making recourse to the Judge inevitable.
We also deal with cases of citizenship denied administratively, i.e. when the Public Administration (Municipalities or Italian Consulates) considers that, due to Italian regulations on civil status, citizenship has not been transmitted and the applicant is therefore not entitled to it.
Our assistance can begin with the search for the Italian documents of the predecessor, and accompanies the client from the preparatory phase of the analysis of the documents, throughout the judicial process, up to the concrete attainment of the status of citizen iure sanguinis, which takes place with the transcriptions in the civil registers at the Commune of birth of the Italian ancestor. Our legal support can also go further: we also deal with AIRE (Anagrafe degli Italiani residenti all'Estero - Register of Italians Resident Abroad) registration procedures, a fundamental requirement for applying for an Italian passport.
Moreover, through a network of external collaborators, both in Italy and abroad, we are able to complete our assistance with preliminary activities such as, for example: genealogical research, issuing, translating, apostilling and rectifying foreign civil status documents.
Our team is able to communicate in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, which is essential for our foreign clients, who can speak their own language without having to make any effort or use online translators.
Applications for Italian nationality by residency and by marriage are presented, managed and solicited entirely online. Distance, therefore, is not a problem at all. So much so that the Firm handles hundreds of citizenship applications in favour of people residing in any city in Italy, and also abroad.
We provide advice on the existence of the legal requirements and the documents to be collected in order for the application to be accepted. Because although it is true that the waiting time for Italian citizenship is very important, foreigners must not forget that the first objective must always be the acceptance of the application.
We send the application ourselves, which must be submitted via the telematic system set up by the Ministry of the Interior.
Submitting the application seems easy. In reality, it is a technical operation that requires a great deal of attention and also good familiarity with the computer and the Internet: attaching files that do not comply with the required list, or in the wrong format, or with excessive file size, can lead to heavy prejudice.
After that, the firm is invested with the power to monitor and solicit the progress of the administrative procedure, in all its phases, until the client is proclaimed a full Italian citizen.
The solicitation activity is of primary importance. The time taken to finalise citizenship applications is increasingly long, given the growing number of applications and the accumulation of backlogs for the administration. Italy, by the way, is among the European countries with the highest number of citizenships granted by naturalisation.
Our commitment is aimed at enabling the client to obtain Italian citizenship ahead of the natural waiting time, where ‘natural’ means the time he or she would wait if he or she relied on spontaneous compliance by the administration.
The main objective, therefore, is to have the client obtain citizenship within the time limit set by law, which is currently 24 months, extendable by the Public Administration up to a maximum of 36 months. In any case, during the course of the procedure, we work to further restrict the waiting time by asserting possible reasons of urgency, which differ from case to case.
In the event that the client contacts us after receiving a notice of denial of citizenship, the law firm advises ‘anticipatory’ protection, which consists of submitting a defence brief with the aim of overturning the Administration's orientation, thus convincing it to grant citizenship. The protection is ‘anticipated’ in the sense that the aim is to avoid the final denial: a measure against which it would necessarily be necessary to file a judicial appeal, the settlement of which, however, would take much longer than the time it takes for the Administration to respond to the pleadings against the notice of denial.
