Italy's Courts Keep Expanding Same-Sex Parental Rights — Even as Meloni's Government Tries to Roll Them Back

For nearly four years, Italy’s right-wing government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has waged a quiet but methodical campaign against LGBTQ+ families. Surrogacy abroad has been criminalized as a “universal crime.” Mayors who registered both parents in same-sex households were ordered to stop. Birth certificates were retroactively amended to remove the non-biological mother. Same-sex parents — whose children, in many cases, had already been issued ID documents listing two mothers or two fathers — were told the government no longer recognized their family structure.

But over the past year, Italy’s highest courts have answered that campaign with a remarkable series of rulings that go in the opposite direction. Quietly, ruling by ruling, the judiciary has been rebuilding the legal scaffolding for queer families that Meloni’s coalition has tried to dismantle.

What the courts have actually done

The shift began in earnest in April 2025, when Italy’s Supreme Court — the Corte di Cassazione — ruled that children with same-sex parents must have gender-neutral terms on their identity documents instead of “mother” and “father.” The decision rejected the Meloni government’s preferred framing and reasserted that children of LGBTQ+ couples are entitled to documents that reflect their actual family.

A month later, in May 2025, the Constitutional Court issued a far broader ruling: when a lesbian couple has a child through IVF performed abroad, both women can be automatically registered as the child’s parents at birth. No more stepchild adoption. No more two-year delays in which one mother is treated as a legal stranger to her own child.

Then, in July 2025, the same Constitutional Court ruled that the non-biological mother in a same-sex couple is entitled to mandatory parental leave on the same terms as any other parent. Workplace protections that had been informally denied to thousands of Italian families were now constitutionally guaranteed.

These rulings sound technical. In practice, they touch nearly every part of how a same-sex family functions — who can pick a child up from school, who can authorize medical treatment, who can take leave when a baby is born, who appears on the birth certificate, what name the child carries. For years, Italian LGBTQ+ parents have lived with the legal anxiety of knowing that any of these things could be challenged at any moment. The courts have begun answering: no, they cannot.

The government’s parallel agenda

Running alongside the judicial expansion is a legislative contraction.

In October 2024, the Italian parliament passed Meloni’s signature family-policy law, which made surrogacy a “universal crime” — meaning Italian citizens who use a surrogate abroad, even in countries where the practice is fully legal, can be prosecuted on returning home. Penalties include up to two years in prison and fines reaching €1 million. Because surrogacy is the only practical path to biological parenthood for most gay male couples in Italy (which still does not allow joint adoption by same-sex couples), the law was widely understood as targeted directly at gay families.

The Meloni government has also instructed prefects to challenge mayors — particularly in Milan, Padua, and Turin — who registered same-sex parents on birth certificates. In some cases, parents who already had documents listing two mothers received notice that the second mother had been removed from their child’s records, leaving children with one legal parent overnight.

Why the courts are pushing back

The judicial pattern is not random. Italian courts have repeatedly cited two sources of authority that override domestic political preferences: the Italian Constitution’s protection of children’s rights and family life, and Italy’s binding obligations under European Union law and the European Convention on Human Rights.

When the Constitutional Court ruled on automatic recognition of both lesbian mothers, it leaned heavily on the principle that a child’s right to a stable legal relationship with their parents cannot depend on the sexual orientation of those parents. When the Supreme Court ordered gender-neutral documents, it pointed to the practical reality that the children already exist and need IDs that reflect their lives.

This is not a uniquely Italian phenomenon. The same dynamic is playing out across the EU — courts in Romania, Bulgaria, and elsewhere have issued binding rulings that member-state governments cannot legally ignore, even when they wish to. The Court of Justice of the European Union has emphasized repeatedly over the past two years that recognition of LGBTQ+ family ties acquired in one member state cannot be erased the moment a family crosses an internal border.

What it means for queer families on the ground

For Italian LGBTQ+ parents, the practical effect of the recent rulings is significant but uneven. The Constitutional Court’s decisions are immediately binding, but local registrars, prefectures, and bureaucracies do not always apply them consistently. Many families still face delays, paperwork battles, and the need to litigate individually to enforce rights that, on paper, they already have.

Italian LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organizations have warned that the government may attempt to legislate around the court rulings — proposing new laws designed to constrain or complicate compliance. Parliament has not yet gone that far, but the political appetite is clearly there.

For now, though, the trajectory is clear: every time the Meloni government tries to draw a harder line around what counts as a family in Italy, the country’s highest courts have moved the line in the opposite direction. The next major test will likely involve adoption rights for gay male couples, which remain stuck in legislative limbo. If the courts continue their current trend, that may not be where the question is finally settled either.

The broader European context

Italy is not an outlier. Across the EU, a pattern has emerged in which national governments — particularly those drawn from the populist right — pursue restrictive LGBTQ+ legislation while courts at every level push back. Hungary’s Pride ban faces ongoing EU infringement proceedings. Slovakia’s constitutional amendment limiting legal gender recognition has triggered formal Commission action. Romania has been forced to recognize trans gender identities established in other EU states.

This is the new architecture of LGBTQ+ rights in Europe: not a single triumphant march of progress, but a slow trench war between elected legislatures and constitutional courts, with families caught in the middle. In Italy, at least for now, the courts are winning.

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Sources: Corte di Cassazione rulings (April 2025); Italian Constitutional Court decisions (May and July 2025); Italian Law No. 169/2024 (surrogacy); ILGA-Europe Annual Review 2026; Human Rights Watch World Report 2026; reporting from The Nation and Eurac Research.