On June 22, 2026, ISTAT (the Italian National Institute of Statistics) published its first comprehensive report on the efficiency of the Italian justice system, analyzing civil and criminal proceedings between 2019 and 2025 in light of the objectives set by Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).
The report confirms what many applicants and practitioners have witnessed over the past year: citizenship cases have become one of the greatest challenges facing the Italian civil justice system.
According to ISTAT, citizenship proceedings required an average of 1,304 days to conclude in the Tribunali in 2025, making them the slowest category of civil litigation in Italy. Even international protection (asylum) cases averaged fewer days (1,224), while most other civil matters – including contracts, family disputes, labor, and succession cases – were resolved much sooner.
The report also shows that citizenship cases had one of the lowest Clearance Rates (0.76). In simple terms, Italian courts resolved only 76 citizenship cases for every 100 new cases filed, meaning that new filings continued to outpace the courts’ ability to dispose of them.
ISTAT further observes that courts handling a large number of citizenship, international protection, and family cases experienced greater difficulty meeting the efficiency targets established under the PNRR, despite significant organizational reforms and increased judicial resources.
Perhaps most significantly, the report notes that citizenship filings reached their highest level in 2024, immediately before the legislative reforms that radically changed Italian citizenship law.
These official statistics provide important context for what occurred during 2025 and the first half of 2026.
To meet the PNRR objectives, Italian courts were under extraordinary institutional pressure to reduce both the duration of civil proceedings and the historical judicial backlog of pending cases. As a result, many courts accelerated the issuance of judgments, including in citizenship matters.
The concern, however, is whether speed has come at the expense of long-term efficiency.
If a significant number of first-instance citizenship cases were dismissed without fully addressing complex constitutional and European law issues, many of those decisions are likely to be appealed. Rather than reducing the judiciary’s workload, this could simply transfer the backlog from the Tribunali to the Courts of Appeal, where each case must be reviewed by a panel of three judges instead of a single judge.
The ISTAT report itself demonstrates that citizenship litigation was already among the most demanding areas of civil justice before this wave of decisions. Whether the recent acceleration will ultimately improve the efficiency of the judicial system – or merely postpone the judicial backlog problem to the appellate level – remains an open question.
One thing, however, is already clear from the official data: citizenship litigation has become one of the defining challenges of the Italian civil justice system.