Italy's highest court has struck down the thesis of Grand Naturalization, which impacted thousands of Italian citizenship processes. The ruling, from the joint session, was published this Wednesday (24).
The decision by the Court of Cassation in Rome will now have a positive and direct impact on the lives of approximately 6 million Italian-Brazilians. The ruling also covers cases in which the State Attorney's Office has filed appeals and which are awaiting a decision.
“The United Sessions (of the Court of Cassation) create jurisprudence. So much so that I have already contacted a well-known prosecutor of mine, to understand what will happen with my 150 appeals”, said lawyer Antonio Cattaneo, to Italianismo.
According to him, it will now be necessary to wait for the end of the “suspension feriale I ended the process”, also called “judges’ vacation”, which ends on August 31st.
“It is just a matter of time to know if the Court of Appeal will request a meeting to discuss with the lawyers involved and issue the same sentence”, in a kind of “copy and paste”.
For Cattaneo, new acts of appeal will certainly not be presented by the State Attorney's Office. This will be the end of the thesis of Grand Naturalization.
Read here the decision in full (in Italian)
Theme mobilized Italian-Brazilians
The debate surrounding the decision of the 'Corte Suprema di Cassazione' in Rome regarding the Great Naturalization has mobilized politicians and analysts in recent months.
In May, news began to circulate that the Italian Public Prosecutor's Office, through the "Avvocatura dello Stato" (State Advocacy Office), was delaying Italian citizenship "iuris sanguinis" processes based on a decree from November 15, 1889, according to which all Italian immigrants in Brazil were naturalized Brazilians.
According to the decree, this "automatic naturalization" of Italian immigrants in Brazil would invalidate the Italian ancestry of their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Therefore, Italian citizenship processes would also be invalidated. This thesis became known as the Great Naturalization.
In the sentence published this Wednesday, the magistrates said that “the reason is that the citizenship nexus can never be based on fiction”.
The matter reached the deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro (PL), member of the Foreign Relations and National Defense Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, who sent a letter to the Italian ambassador to Brazil, Francesco Azzarello, asking for clarification on the topic.
On July 12, when the hearing was held at the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome, Italianismo promoted live debate, broadcast on Facebook, reflecting on the subject, mediated by journalist Reginaldo Maia, director of the portal.
The debate had the participation of the Italian-Brazilian deputy Luis Roberto Lorenzato, from the lawyer Antonio Cattaneo (defender in the action at the Court of Cassation), senator Fabio Porta, in the Italian Parliament, and the lawyer Daniela Mariani, specialist in international law and immigration.
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