| Verified against primary record | |
| Treaty status | In March 2026 the governing body decided not to advance to drafting a convention at this stage[1] |
|---|---|
| Next review | The Permanent Bureau is to monitor developments and report before the 2028 meeting[1] |
| The core problem | Parentage established in one state but not recognised in another, described as limping legal parentage[2] |
| Records read | The project page and the experts’ group final report, 30 September 2026 |
| Independently reported | |
| Human rights case law | Summarised from legal commentary, not from the Court’s own record[3] |
| Bands apply only to the rows beneath them. This entry describes law and process only. No national legal positions are named, for the reason given in the sourcing note. | |
Surrogacy abroad is the arrangement by which intended parents enter into a surrogacy agreement in a country other than their own. The medical procedure is assisted reproduction and is covered elsewhere on this site. What distinguishes this subject is that its central difficulty arises after the birth, and concerns the legal status of the child rather than anyone’s medical treatment.
The problem the law has not solved
States take fundamentally different positions, ranging from prohibiting surrogacy outright to permitting and regulating it, and those differences produce conflicts in how legal parentage is established.[2] The Hague Conference on Private International Law, which has examined the question since 2016, states the underlying difficulty plainly: there is as yet no international consensus on how to establish and contest legal parentage, and international surrogacy arrangements can often result in difficulties concerning the establishment or recognition of the legal parentage of the children, sometimes rendering the child parentless.[1]
The condition has a name in that work. Legal parentage established in one state but not recognised in others results in what the experts’ group called limping legal parentage, which can create significant problems for children and their parents.[2] The same report notes that such arrangements can involve abuses and raise questions of compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly the best interests of the child.
Where the treaty work stands
This is the point on which most existing writing is now out of date. An experts’ group ran from 2016 to 2022 and recommended two binding instruments: a convention on legal parentage generally, and a separate protocol specifically on legal parentage arising from international surrogacy arrangements. It concluded that recognition rules built on uniform indirect grounds of jurisdiction, traditional private international law conditions and optional grounds for refusal of recognition would be feasible to develop.[2] A working group then sat from 2023 to 2025, examining the feasibility of a convention on the recognition of judgments on legal parentage.[1]
In March 2026 the Conference’s governing body decided not to advance to a special commission to draft a possible convention at this stage, and asked the Permanent Bureau to monitor developments and report back before its 2028 meeting.[1] Any account describing an international surrogacy convention as forthcoming or in drafting is therefore describing a state of affairs that ended in March 2026.
The human rights position
In the absence of a treaty, the constraint on states has come from human rights litigation. Legal commentary on the European Court of Human Rights case law records that in a 2014 judgment the Court found that a refusal to recognise the legal relationship between intended parents and children born through surrogacy abroad violated the children’s right to respect for private life, and that in its first advisory opinion, delivered in April 2019, the Court held that a general and absolute impossibility of obtaining recognition of the relationship between such a child and the intended mother is incompatible with the child’s best interests, while leaving states to choose the means of recognition, whether by transcription of the foreign birth certificate or by adoption.[3]
That account comes from a law review rather than from the Court’s own record, which could not be reached for this entry, and should be verified against the judgments themselves before being relied on. The direction of travel it describes is nonetheless consistent with the Hague material: the problem is being addressed case by case, through the rights of the child, rather than by a general instrument.
No source located reports a measured count of international surrogacy arrangements.
See also
- Fertility tourism, the treatment side of the same journey
- Birth tourism, the other field where a birth abroad raises questions of status
- Medical travel for children, for the best interests standard
- Medical travel for LGBTQ+ patients, among whom this route is frequently used
References
- Hague Conference on Private International Law. Parentage / Surrogacy Project. Status current as of March 2026. Verified against primary record: the organisation’s own project page opened and read. Retrieved 30 September 2026.
- Hague Conference on Private International Law, Experts’ Group on Parentage / Surrogacy. Final Report: The feasibility of one or more private international law instruments on legal parentage. November 2022. Verified against primary record: report opened and read. Retrieved 30 September 2026.
- Margaria A. Parenthood and Cross-Border Surrogacy: What Is New? The ECtHR’s First Advisory Opinion. Medical Law Review, vol. 28, issue 2, 2020. Independently reported: peer-reviewed legal commentary, not the Court’s own record. Retrieved 30 September 2026.
Sourcing note: the project page and the experts’ group report were opened and read on 30 September 2026. The court’s case law is summarised from legal commentary because the Court’s own record could not be reached, and is labelled as such so that an editor can verify the operative wording before it is relied on. No individual country’s legal position is named, because no official comparative source was opened and the only verified statement about national divergence is general. The absence of a measured count is stated as not located rather than as officially confirmed, since no source explicitly declares the absence.