Mr. Jean Ayoub:

As the secretary general of the International Social Service, I am honoured to attend today's meeting with my team. We are very pleased to have the opportunity to share with the committee further insights on the Verona Principles for the protection of the rights of the child who has been born through surrogacy.

The Verona Principles were published in March 2021 after a five-year long consultation process. Several members of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, CRC, endorsed these principles, along with its drafting work. The ISS also could count on the support of the United Nations special rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, as well as other international organisations that are working on matters related to children’s rights and surrogacy. The ISS engaged on this extensively and recognised the existence of important legal and practical gaps when it comes to respecting the rights of children who are born through surrogacy, despite the increasing recourse to assisted reproductive technologies, including through surrogacy.

The variety of domestic legal responses to surrogacy has led to persons seeking to have a child through surrogacy making the necessary arrangements in a surrogacy-friendly jurisdiction. This, together, with the financial benefits that might be gained, has resulted in the casual development of an international commercial surrogacy market with inherent risks of human rights abuses. It also has led to extremely complex and delicate cross-border problems in terms of safeguarding the rights of the children concerned.

While over the past years, case law has been developing from the perspective of children’s rights, neither the convention on the rights of the child nor any other international instrument deals explicitly with this question, leaving the different interpretations open. Therefore, nearly ten years ago, the ISS called for international recognition of surrogacy arrangements as they affect the children concerned. In this context, the ISS launched an initiative in 2016 to draw a set of principles that could be agreed on globally to guide and inform policy and legislation.

With the permission of the Chair, I will hand over to my associate, Ms Woellenstein.