Why Countries Are Banning International Adoptions

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) Switzerland is planning to ban international adoptions, following revelations of shady practices in the past. Other countries banning international adoptions claim they are doing it for the child's welfare, but sometimes it's just about power politics.

This content was published on February 14, 2025 - 09:00 12 minutes

Over 20 years of experience in journalism. Graduated from Moscow State University's Faculty of Journalism and the French Press Institute in Paris. Former TV and radio presenter in France and Russia. Areas of expertise: international relations and human rights. Published author. I have interviewed presidents, rock stars and political prisoners.

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Children from abroad should no longer be adopted in Switzerland in the future – this is the plan of the Swiss governmentExternal link .

In 2023 the government acknowledged significant irregularities in international adoptionsExternal link between 1970 and 1999. These findingsExternal link by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) highlighted systemic failures and negligence by both federal and cantonal authorities .

Several thousand children from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, India, Colombia, South Korea, Lebanon and Romania were brought to Switzerland through illegal practices, including child trafficking, forged documents and missing information about their origins. The written consent of biological parents was often lacking link In Chile and Brazil, for example, several cases have been documented where a child's birth document was falsified.

“There are always loopholes”

An adoption ban doesn't mean adoptions won't happen, Philip Jaffé from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child tells SWI swissinfo.“You can't just bring the child from abroad like that, but these adoptions will continue – Swiss law doesn't cover what happens in every country, just like the right to donate your egg. It can be controlled to some extent in Switzerland. But nothing will stop a woman going to Spain and doing things a little bit differently and getting pregnant.”

He also finds there is something“hypocritical” in this ban.“We're going to prohibit it now when we have only 30 adoptions in Switzerland [a year], but in the Eighties we had a thousand.”

Philip Jaffe presents the Child Rights Committee (CRC) findings on Bulgaria, Congo, Lithuania, Russian Federation, Senegal and South Africa, during a press conference in Geneva. Keystone / Martial Trezzini

“There are always loopholes,” Jaffé says.“We have kids who were born in California, from a surrogate mother where there's an open and legal process to have a mother for hire. A couple in their seventies shows up in Switzerland with a baby that they've adopted legally. At the border there's not much you can do. You're not going to take the child away from them. You're not going to send the couple back.”

Joëlle Schickel-Küng, deputy head of the private law division at the justice ministry SRF

Joëlle Schickel-Küng, deputy head of the private law division at the justice ministry, explains that the policy decision targets situations“where prospective adoptive parents live in Switzerland and apply for the adoption of a child currently living abroad”.

“It does not look at the cases of people living abroad and adopting a child in their country of residence, who later move as a family to Switzerland. Situations involving surrogacy arrangements abroad are usually not considered to be an intercountry adoption,” she told SWI swissinfo.

The dark side of international adoptions

Several European countries have already rejected international adoption due to serious violations. In many cases, children were taken from their biological parents under false pretences, while intermediaries and officials received illegal payments.

“There is so much money involved that almost no one does it purely out of the goodness of their heart. The presence of money attracts too many predators, making ethical practices nearly impossible,” Jaffé says.

It all comes down to corruption or the risk of corruption, he says, making it highly uncertain that the process can ever be truly clean.“That's exactly what the Hague Convention aimed to address. And while it has been more effective in some countries – working much better in Brazil than in Belarus or Peru, for example – problems still persist.”

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