Corrado Caruso: The Constitutional Court as Heracles, Confronting the Fate of Italian Descendants Abroad
Corrado Caruso’s intervention operates on two complementary levels. On the one hand, it advances a human-centered and rights-protective argument designed to ensure that Italian descendants abroad are not penalized for circumstances beyond their control. On the other, it presents a broader constitutional and institutional argument inviting the Constitutional Court to examine whether the Government lawfully relied upon emergency legislative powers to implement a structural reform of citizenship law. It is precisely the combination of these two perspectives—the protection of individuals and the defense of constitutional principles—that gives Caruso’s submission its particular persuasive force. As in Euripides’ metaphor, the underlying question is whether constitutional law should merely observe a seemingly completed fate, or whether, like Heracles in Alcestis, it may still intervene to prevent a loss from becoming final and irreversible.
Among the most significant interventions during the hearing of 9 June was that of Professor Corrado Caruso, Full Professor of Constitutional and Public Law at the University of Bologna, who presented a submission combining constitutional analysis, human sensitivity, and a remarkable reference to classical literature.
The most evocative moment of his argument came at the conclusion of the first part of his address, when he invoked Euripides’ tragedy Alcestis. The story is well known. King Admetus is allowed to escape death only if another person agrees to die in his place. No one volunteers except his wife, Alcestis, who sacrifices her own life to save him. When all appears irretrievably lost, Heracles arrives. The hero confronts Death itself and succeeds in restoring Alcestis to the world of the living.
The power of this image lies in the fact that Heracles does not create a new reality, nor does he alter the rules of fate. Rather, his intervention prevents a situation brought about by circumstances beyond Alcestis’ control from becoming a definitive and irreversible loss.
It is precisely this symbolic function that Caruso attributes to the Constitutional Court. In one of the most striking passages of the hearing, he observed that the Court is called upon to play “a role not unlike that entrusted by Euripides to Heracles in Alcestis.” He further argued that, just as Heracles rescues Alcestis from Hades, the constitutional judge should prevent applicants from “remaining permanently imprisoned by the administrative inefficiencies that have prevented the examination of their applications.”
This classical reference is far more than a rhetorical flourish. It encapsulates the human dimension underlying the entire controversy. The affected applicants did not lose their opportunity through negligence or lack of interest. Many initiated the prescribed procedures, enrolled on waiting lists, used appointment systems established by consular authorities, or otherwise formally manifested their intention to seek recognition of Italian citizenship. Nevertheless, organizational deficiencies within the consular administration prevented them from obtaining an appointment before the deadline imposed by Decree-Law No. 36/2025.
Against this backdrop, Caruso developed his first major constitutional argument. Judgment No. 63 of 2026 had already acknowledged that the Decree-Law introduced a genuine form of legal retroactivity by altering the legal characterization of the position held by descendants of Italian citizens.
For decades, settled case law had regarded such individuals as holders of a vested subjective right to citizenship, existing from birth and requiring only formal recognition. Judgment No. 63 of 2026, however, recharacterized that position as a legal expectation or status contingent upon prior administrative or judicial verification.
According to the defense, this transformation directly affects the constitutional principle of legitimate expectations and legal certainty. The so-called Tajani Decree chose to protect, through a transitional safeguarding clause, only those applicants who had obtained a consular appointment before 27 March 2025.
Caruso argued that this criterion is inherently unreasonable because it differentiates between individuals who are substantively identical on the basis of circumstances entirely beyond their control. As he observed during the hearing, the practical possibility of submitting an application depended upon “bureaucratic and economic factors entirely unrelated to the will of the applicant.” The success or failure of an application therefore became dependent upon the efficiency of the competent consulate rather than upon the diligence of the applicant.
This criticism is directed squarely at the constitutional principle of equality enshrined in Article 3 of the Italian Constitution. It is difficult to justify a situation in which two individuals who embarked upon the same administrative process receive radically different treatment solely because one happened to encounter a more efficient administrative authority than the other.
For this reason, Caruso proposed a corrective constitutional remedy. The Court could declare the transitional safeguarding clause unconstitutional insofar as it limits protection exclusively to those who secured a formal appointment, extending that protection to all individuals who unequivocally manifested their intention to seek recognition of citizenship but were unable to complete the process for objective reasons not attributable to them.
From an analytical perspective, this first argument constitutes an appeal both to law and to equity. Legally, it rests upon the protection of legitimate expectations and the principle of equality. Humanly, it focuses on individuals who spent years attempting to maintain a connection with their ancestral national community, only to find themselves confined in what may aptly be described as an “administrative limbo”—a situation reflected in Caruso’s description of applications formally submitted but never processed or answered by the competent consular authorities.
The image of Heracles perfectly captures this dimension: preventing circumstances beyond an individual's control from being transformed into an irreversible loss of rights and opportunities.
The second part of Caruso’s intervention shifted the focus from the plight of individual applicants to the constitutional structure of the Italian legal system and the legislative process itself. Here he addressed Article 77 of the Italian Constitution and the constitutional limits governing the use of emergency decree legislation.
His reasoning begins with what appears to be a paradox. If the Constitutional Court itself has held that the position of Italian descendants abroad still requires administrative or judicial verification before becoming fully consolidated, it becomes difficult to identify the emergency that could justify immediate governmental intervention through a decree-law.
If the legal effects of citizenship had not yet materialized and the relevant proceedings remained pending, those situations were destined to develop through ordinary administrative and judicial procedures already provided by law. Consequently, there was no extraordinary or unforeseeable event requiring urgent executive action.
According to Caruso, the phenomenon of citizenship recognition applications based on descent was not a sudden emergency. It was a long-standing reality, linked to structural and persistent administrative shortcomings. In one of the central passages of his argument, he emphasized that the Government “did not intervene to address an extraordinary and unforeseeable event,” but rather to affect a plurality of legal situations still in the process of formation.
Accordingly, Decree-Law No. 36/2025 was not employed to confront an exceptional crisis but to introduce a general reform of the Italian citizenship regime.
Caruso further noted that the decree contains provisions extending far beyond the specific issues under consideration by the Court. Several of those provisions modify fundamental aspects of citizenship acquisition, revealing a clear reformist and systemic purpose.
In the terminology of Italian constitutional law, this means that the decree-law was not intended to address a situation of extraordinary necessity and urgency, but rather to introduce a stable, general, and permanent modification of the legal order. Put differently, it was not a measure designed to respond to a concrete and immediate emergency, but a structural legislative intervention aimed at redefining the legal framework governing Italian citizenship.
For this reason, Caruso argued that the measure amounted to “a general reform of citizenship law,” a matter that should have been debated and enacted through the ordinary parliamentary legislative process rather than through an exceptional instrument reserved for urgent circumstances.
From an analytical standpoint, this second argument possesses a significantly broader institutional dimension than the first. The controversy ceases to concern solely the fate of individual applicants and instead implicates the constitutional allocation of power between the Government and Parliament.
Whereas the first part of the argument focuses on protecting individuals affected by administrative inefficiencies, the second centers on safeguarding the constitutional balance of powers. The fundamental question is no longer who is entitled to Italian citizenship, but rather who possesses the authority to alter the legal framework governing citizenship and through which constitutional procedures such changes may legitimately be enacted.
Ultimately, Corrado Caruso’s intervention operates on two complementary levels. On the one hand, it advances a human-centered and rights-protective argument designed to ensure that Italian descendants abroad are not penalized for circumstances beyond their control. On the other, it presents a broader constitutional and institutional argument inviting the Constitutional Court to examine whether the Government lawfully relied upon emergency legislative powers to implement a structural reform of citizenship law.
It is precisely the combination of these two perspectives—the protection of individuals and the defense of constitutional principles—that gives Caruso’s submission its particular persuasive force. As in Euripides’ metaphor, the underlying question is whether constitutional law should merely observe a seemingly completed fate, or whether, like Heracles in Alcestis, it may still intervene to prevent a loss from becoming final and irreversible.
Pablo Munini
Attorney-at-Law