ROME (AP) — Italy’s highest court has ruled that children born with Italian citizenship do not automatically lose it when a parent later becomes a citizen of another country, a decision expected to bolster citizenship-by-descent claims by descendants of Italian emigrants worldwide. At the center of the dispute was whether children automatically lost Italian citizenship when an Italian parent later acquired a foreign nationality while the children were still minors. What the court decidedIn its new ruling, the court said that under Italy’s historical citizenship laws, children who were already Italian citizens by birth under the principle of “iure sanguinis,” or citizenship by bloodline, did not automatically lose their Italian citizenship when a parent became a citizen of another country. The court clarified that children born in countries that automatically grant citizenship at birth — including the United States — retained their Italian citizenship even if their parents later naturalized there. Mellone estimated that several hundred thousand families may have been affected by the restrictive interpretation adopted in recent years.