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As part of the general debate during the ongoing 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council, an international coalition of non-governmental organizations will present a joint statement supporting the initiative to introduce a global moratorium on surrogacy.

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The declaration on this matter was announced in June by Italy, Chile, Cameroon, and the Holy See.

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The document treats the moratorium as a transitional stage toward the adoption of a binding international treaty that would ultimately ban surrogacy at the global level.

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The call for a moratorium was supported by Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who identified surrogate mothers as a group particularly exposed to violence.

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The Ordo Iuris Institute has joined the group of organizations backing this statement.

The Geneva declaration as a starting point

During the currently ongoing 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council (September 7 – October 7), an international coalition of civil-society organizations will present a statement supporting a political declaration that calls for the introduction of an international moratorium on surrogacy, understood as a temporary suspension of the practice pending a thorough assessment of its legal, ethical, and social consequences. The coalition includes, among others, the Ordo Iuris Institute.

The declaration was announced on June 22 on the occasion of the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The document was presented by Italy and Chile, with the support of Cameroon and the Holy See. The declaration points to the commercialization of human life and of women’s reproductive capacity, and to the harm done to children through their deliberate separation from the women who gave birth to them, as the fundamental grounds for the eventual adoption of a binding treaty banning this practice at the global level. Among the risks identified for women and girls caught up in the surrogacy trade were serious medical dangers, coercion, and exploitation, while for children they included the risk of abandonment, human trafficking, and statelessness.

Italy’s Minister for Family, Birth Rate and Equal Opportunities, Eugenia Roccella, emphasized during the announcement of the declaration that surrogacy had ceased to be an internal matter for individual states and had become a global phenomenon, shaped by international markets, cross-border contracts, and deep inequalities. A similar tone was struck by a representative of Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Felipe Kipreos Palau, who pointed out that divergences between national legal orders create regulatory gaps that carry harm across state borders.

The announcement of the declaration was endorsed by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, who in her report “Violence against mothers” (A/HRC/62/49) identified surrogate mothers as a group particularly exposed to violence and exploitation. Not all states, however, share this position — at the same forum, opposition to the moratorium proposal was voiced by Ireland, Canada, and Mexico, among others.

Ordo Iuris among the organizations supporting the moratorium

During the ongoing 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council, the coalition of non-governmental organizations will present, as part of the general debate, a joint oral statement — limited by procedural rules to 90 seconds — supporting the Geneva declaration and the call for a global moratorium on surrogacy. Under the formula adopted by the coalition, the statement will be delivered on behalf of the group of organizations, without naming any single entity as its author, so as to underscore the broad, transnational character of the support for the proposal.

Ordo Iuris was among the organizations that gave the statement their formal support. This decision fits into the work that the Ordo Iuris Institute has been carrying out for some time at UN and EU forums on surrogacy, including monitoring work on the EU’s so-called anti-trafficking directive (2024/1712), which for the first time in EU law classifies exploitation connected with surrogacy as a form of human trafficking, as well as the positions Ordo Iuris has previously taken on protecting biological motherhood and the identity of the child.

“The debate at the Human Rights Council shows that opposition to surrogacy is ceasing to be a marginal stance and is becoming the subject of serious international discussion. Surrogacy remains a form of commercialization of a woman’s body and of the separation of a child from the mother who gave birth to it, no matter how heavily this practice is now wrapped in the language of individual rights. By supporting this statement, Ordo Iuris is joining a growing group of states and organizations that treat the protection of women and children against the commercialization of motherhood as a shared duty of the international community, one that transcends political and cultural divides,” notes Julia Książek of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law.

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Source of cover photo: iStock