That upcoming April 1 Corte di Cassazione hearing AND other cases to watch

As you all have heard, Avv. Marco Mellone has been teasing about his upcoming hearing on April 1 at the Corte di Cassazione for one of his minor issue cases. Yes, there’s multiple in the works, we’ll get to the others in a bit.

The case that he’s been talking about is RG 19817/2023, which had its initial hearing on May 29, 2024. In response to that first hearing, a preliminary sentence was issued on August 27, 2024, which summarized Mellone’s arguments to the Court and ordered that a subsequent hearing be held (the April 1 hearing).

The mods have acquired that preliminary sentence.

I’m going to be purposefully vague and paraphrase some things for obvious privacy/ongoing case reasons, but we also wanted to give you guys some explanation as to why Avv. Mellone has been excited. I will say that the specific jus soli country is one of the countries you’re thinking of, but I’m going to remove comments speculating about it to keep those details private.

Background: (male) LIBRA naturalized in 1944 when the jus soli-born next in line was still a minor.

Mellone’s argument is twofold:

1. Art 12(2) of 555/1912 is unconstitutional because justifying the minor issue with the idea that the family unit needs to have the same, unified citizenship, goes against the Corte di Costituzionale ruling in 30/1983 that the child’s citizenship is generally independent from that of the mother.
   1. You might know this ruling as combining: 1) the age of majority becoming 18 in 1975, 2) the end of wives’ automatic acquisition of Italian citizenship by marriage in 1983, and 3) establishing that the father wasn’t the de facto custodial parent (“patria potestà”) anymore.
2. The jus soli-born minor was 18 years old - which was the age of majority of their birth/residence country - at the time of the LIBRA’s naturalization. The Tribunale and Corte d’Appello di Roma both failed to acknowledge this argument.

The Court’s response was that they’ll be addressing both arguments, but the interesting part is that the Court not only acknowledges that the minor issue isn't necessarily set in stone, but also that the relationship between Articles 7, 8, and 12 of 555/1912 is still up for interpretation:

Il collegio ritiene, pertanto, [...] una questione di diritto di particolare rilevanza, della quale è opportuna la trattazione in pubblica udienza, venendo in rilievo l'interpretazione degli artt. 7, 8 e 12, secondo comma, della legge n.555/1912 e la definizione degli ambiti applicativi di dette disposizioni. [...] La questione, tuttavia, rimane molto dibattuta in sede di merito, come illustrato dai ricorrenti negli atti di parte, e riguarda un contenzioso astrattamente ampio.

Now that we have the April 1 hearing out of the way, let’s talk about other citizenship-related Cassazione cases to keep an eye on:

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First things first, Avv. Mellone’s case isn’t the only citizenship case being heard on April 1st, if you direct your attention towards the blue rows. I don’t know the details of RG 8548/2024 or 11785/2024, but it’s probably not a coincidence that they’re all being heard on the same day. Unfortunately, neither of their hearings on March 6th yielded a preliminary sentence for me to dissect.

The purple rows are cases that I’m fairly certain are also Avv. Mellone’s, but seeing as only lawyers’ initials are public, I can’t say with 100% accuracy. But the important part is that we have another hearing date to pay attention to: May 27th. The mods also don’t know what these cases are about, but we’ll let you know when we do.

Finally, the gray rows are cases that I have confirmed are minor issue cases with a female LIBRA. Again, being vague here, as only one of those cases has shared their RG number with others.