The Italian Chamber of Deputies is examining a bill that would change both doors of Italian citizenship: how the Italian-born children of immigrants may acquire it, and the grounds on which it may be revoked once acquired. Bill A.C. 2124 would amend the citizenship law of 1992, attaching new criminal-record conditions to the route open to people born and raised in Italy, and adding serious ordinary crimes to the grounds for revocation, which are today limited to terrorism-related offences.
On 21 July 2026, the Chamber's Constitutional Affairs Committee opened a cycle of informal hearings on the bill. Among the experts invited was the Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), based at the EUI's Global Governance Programme (GGP) in the Robert Schuman Centre (RSC), whose open-access databases document the citizenship laws of states around the world. Representing the observatory, Maarten Vink, Chair in Citizenship Studies at the EUI and GLOBALCIT Co-Director, presented a comparison of the citizenship laws in force across 32 European states: the EU-27, the EFTA states, and the United Kingdom. We asked him about his experience speaking in the Parliament and what the European comparison shows.
Can you tell us a bit more about GLOBALCIT and how the invitation to speak before the Italian Chamber in Rome came about?
GLOBALCIT is the Global Citizenship Observatory, based at the Global Governance Programme of the EUI's Robert Schuman Centre. With a network of over 250 country experts worldwide, we document how citizenship is acquired and lost in every country, and we make it all freely available: open-access databases, country reports, and the GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset. The idea is simple: When a parliament debates citizenship reform, it should be possible to see, on the basis of verified legal sources, how the proposal compares with the law in force everywhere else. That is how the Rome meeting came about: The Constitutional Affairs Committee opened hearings on the citizenship bill, the Observatory was invited, and I presented a comparison between 32 European states.
This kind of engagement is among the most rewarding parts of our work. As with media interviews, I like doing these kinds of public interventions precisely because they take me out of my academic comfort zone. And I strongly believe in the public value of providing critical but evidence-based feedback on current political developments in my field. That’s something many of us do all the time at the Robert Schuman Centre. Over the years, it has taken me from the European Parliament's Constitutional Affairs Committee to the Council of Europe, to various national discussions, and now to a commissioned comparative study on citizenship revocation in the Netherlands.
Our role is never to tell legislators what to decide; it is to make sure that when they decide, they know what the evidence shows.
You told the Committee that a child born in Italy to foreign parents is "born a foreigner, whatever the parents' residence history," and that Italy's route to citizenship for these children is already among the most demanding in Europe. How does Italy compare with other European countries, and what would the bill change?
It is remarkable, and worrying, that some Italian legislators aim to restrict the access to citizenship for children born in Italy to foreign parents, given that the existing rules are already among the most restrictive in Europe. Eleven of the 32 states we compared grant citizenship at birth to some children of immigrant parents: Germany after five years of parental residence, France automatically if a parent was also born in France, and similar rules in Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, and others. Italy grants nothing at birth, apart from the safeguard for children who would otherwise be stateless. Its only route based on birth in Italy requires 18 years of uninterrupted legal residence, from birth to majority, followed by a declaration within one year. The bill would condition this route even further: Any conviction for an offence against a person or property, or a drug offence, would preclude acquisition indefinitely, and acquisition would be suspended whenever criminal proceedings are merely pending. This is really quite alarming. Conduct conditions exist elsewhere, but each is limited by a gravity threshold, a list of specified serious offences, or a time window. No state in Europe attaches such an unlimited bar to a birthright entitlement.
The bill makes citizenship conditional on a clean record, on the logic that citizenship should reward integration. You cited research suggesting it also works the other way around: children granted citizenship at birth do better at school and are recorded for crimes far less often. What does the evidence say?
The bill's logic treats citizenship as a certificate handed out at the end of the integration process. The evidence says citizenship is better understood as a catalyst of that process. Germany's 2000 reform, which introduced a conditional ius soli, works as a natural experiment: children who were granted citizenship at birth went on to perform significantly better in school, compared to those who narrowly missed out on this due to the timing of their birth. A study published this year adds the crime dimension: those same children were recorded by the police as suspects about 70% less often than comparable peers, above all for property and drug offences, precisely the offences this bill is concerned with. Research on the Netherlands points the same way: the earlier children of immigrants acquire citizenship, the better their school outcomes. So, a policy that withholds citizenship from young people born in Italy is likely to work against the bill's own stated objective.
Under the bill, someone born and raised in Italy who acquired citizenship at 18 could later lose it if convicted of a serious crime. A citizen by descent with an identical life history could not. Why do most European countries refuse to revoke citizenship for ordinary crimes, even serious ones?
Because revocation for ordinary crimes punishes the same crime twice, but only for some citizens. The criminal law already punishes homicide or serious violence, severely and equally for everyone. Revocation adds a second penalty that can only ever fall on citizens by acquisition, and in practice only on dual citizens: The person who grew up in Italy loses citizenship, while a citizen by descent with an identical record does not. Twenty-seven of the 32 states we compared have no such ground; the bill would move Italy from that majority to the side of the only three states that provide for it. The European Convention on Nationality does not include ordinary crimes among the permitted grounds for deprivation, and the Portuguese Constitutional Court has twice, in the past year, found that legislation of exactly this design violates the equality principle, creating, in effect, second-class citizens. Even Belgium, the closest precedent, requires a court judgement and prohibits any outcome of statelessness. This bill provides neither.
What do you expect will happen from here?
Interesting question, but really difficult to say. It is up to the Italian legislator to decide on the modalities under which citizenship can be acquired and lost. Though it is important to keep in mind that even a sensitive topic such as citizenship is not decided in a legal vacuum. Italy is bound to international and European norms. So, on citizenship revocation, European and international norms point to a judicial procedure with an individual assessment of proportionality and of the risk of statelessness - which is also what European Union law requires when losing national citizenship means losing Union citizenship. Only this month, the Italian Constitutional Court referred a question on another aspect of citizenship law to the Court of Justice of the EU for a preliminary reference. Unfortunately, these days we see proposals to expand the grounds for citizenship revocation popping up across several European states. While this is lamentable, what we as experts can do is point legislators to the need that revocation rules include clear limits, express exemptions, a judicial procedure, and an individual assessment. Then it’s up to legislators to decide on whether and how the law should be amended, and it's up to courts to rule on whether rules are compatible with domestic and international norms.
The full hearing is available on the Camera dei Deputati WebTV.
Maarten Vink holds the Chair in Citizenship Studies at the EUI and co-directs the Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT) at the Global Governance Programme (GGP) of the Robert Schuman Centre (RSC). GLOBALCIT's open-access databases and the GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset document how citizenship is acquired and lost in states around the world; the observatory's most recent report is The Global State of Citizenship 2025.