Why countries are banning international adoptions

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. 

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.External 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.ch. “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.” 

“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, 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.ch. 

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.” 

What is the Hague Convention? 

In January the Committee on the Rights of the ChildExternal link reviewed children’s rights in Peru: every month, around 700-800 children aged 12-17 disappear. “You can only imagine what happens to them,” Jaffé says. “Some are found dead, some are trafficked, some are sexually abused, and some are adopted under questionable circumstances. In a country that doesn’t prioritise child protection and turns a blind eye to such issues, there can never be a guarantee that adoptions are conducted ethically.” 

False pretences 

In 2024 the Dutch government banned its citizens fromExternal link adopting children from abroad due to violations revealed in a very critical report in 2021.External link While ongoing cases can be concluded, new ones are no longer possible. The Netherlands plans to phase out international adoptions by 2030. 

In 2024 Denmark ended international adoptionsExternal link as its only adoption agency, Danish International Adoption, closedExternal link. A report criticised adoptions from South KoreaExternal link in the 1970s-80s as systematically illegal.  

In Norway a major adoption scandalExternal link revealed children from South Korea and Ecuador had been taken under false pretences, given forged documents, and sold to Western European families. Despite recommendations for a temporary suspension, the government has decided to continue adoptions while investigations proceed.  

In 2023 Flanders in Belgium halted all new international adoptionsExternal link owing to reported malpractices in Ethiopia, the Gambia, Haiti and MoroccoExternal link, including cases where children were not voluntarily given up by their parents.External link  

In 2023 UK authorities found evidence of child traffickingExternal link and financial misconduct in adoptions from CambodiaExternal link, Ethiopia and Nigeria, including coerced birth mothers and orphanages receiving payments for placements. Ethiopia had already banned international adoptions in 2018. 

Adoption power play 

In these cases, countries have implemented stricter regulations or restrictions in response to concerns about trafficking, abuse or ethical violations in the adoption process. 

On the other hand, some countries of origin ban international adoptions for political reasons, using it sometimes even as a diplomatic bargaining tool or as a form of retaliation against Western countries. 

It all began with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who died in 1989. He was obsessed with increasing the birth rate, banning abortions and even referring to embryos as “state property”. This led to around 100,000 orphans living in inhumane conditions. After Ceaușescu’s death, journalists from German magazine Der Spiegel documented the horrifying conditions in which abandoned, sick and malnourished children were living.External link 

In 1990 Romania lifted the ban on abortions and allowed international adoption. Within the first three months, nearly 1,500 children were taken abroad to new families – without proper procedures. 

In 2004, as a condition for Romania’s future accessionExternal link to the European Union, the government banned international adoption.  

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Adoption ban as response to sanctions

Since January 1, 2013, the Dima Yakovlev LawExternal link has been in effect in Russia, banning US citizens from adopting Russian orphans. Named after a Russian boy who died due to the negligence of his adoptive parents in the United States, the law was introduced as the Russian response to the US Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on individuals Washington deems responsible for human rights violations in Russia. 

According to the Speaker of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, more than 100,000 Russian children have been adopted by foreigners since 1993. 

A few years ago Russian President Vladimir Putin discovered adoption as a political instrument. In 2022 he signed a law prohibiting foreigners from using surrogacy services in Russia. 

In 2023 a law banning gender transition came into effect, also preventing foreign nationals who have changed their gender from adopting Russian children.  

In 2024 Russia tightened adoption rules for foreign nationals. Citizens of countries where gender transition is legally permitted – whether through medical procedures or by amending official identity documents – can no longer adopt Russian orphans. This ban also applies to Switzerland. 

Russian lawmakers argue that the new regulations will protect adopted Russian children from undergoing gender transition abroad. Gender transition is banned in around 90 countries such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, according to latest Equaldex data.External link  

“Using children as a human shield is a tactic of terrorists – terrorists and Vladimir Putin’s regime,” Vladimir Kara-Murza, a former political prisoner and activist who opposes the Russian adoption ban, tells SWI swissinfo.ch. “Since 2012 this has been the official state policy of the Russian authorities.” 

Kara-Murza considers the legacy of Vladimir Putin. “In future history textbooks, the chapter on the Putin era will also state that in response to Western sanctions against his corrupt officials, the Kremlin took revenge against the West on its own orphaned children. It is hard to find a more telling moral indictment of this regime,” he says. 

Despite banning international adoption, Russian authorities have been abducting, illegally deporting, and placing Ukrainian children for adoption since the start of their war against Ukraine, according to a US-study.External link 

Sarah McCarthy is a documentary director whose films explore the fates of children in Putin’s Russia. McCarthy’s The Dark Matter of LoveExternal link told the story of one of the last Russian children to be adopted into the US before Putin banned adoptions in response to American sanctions.  

“We live in a world where 20,000 Ukrainian mothers are separated from their sons and daughters right now,” she tells SWI swissinfo.ch while preparing the screening in Geneva of her film After the RainExternal link. “Children are not bargaining chips to be exchanged for territory.”