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The Ordo Iuris Institute has signed an international open letter to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child calling for paid surrogacy to be recognized as the sale of children within the meaning of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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The initiative is coordinated by the Casablanca Declaration Group of Experts, and the letter will be delivered to the Committee’s members on September 10, 2026.

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The signatories invoke the positions of UN special rapporteurs and the amended EU “anti-trafficking” directive, which for years have linked surrogacy with human trafficking and the sale of children.

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The letter’s authors point out that the object of a surrogacy contract is not merely a “service,” but the child itself, who is to be handed over to the commissioning parties after birth.

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The letter calls on states to adopt legislative measures protecting children from surrogacy and to begin work on a binding international convention that would ban this practice worldwide.

The child as the object of a contract

On September 10, an open letter prepared at the initiative of the Casablanca Declaration Group of Experts will reach the members of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The group’s spokeswoman is Olivia Maurel — a French-American activist born through surrogacy who has for years testified before parliaments and international institutions about the consequences of this practice for children. The Ordo Iuris Institute is among the organizations that decided to endorse the letter.

The signatories demand that the Committee explicitly recognize that paid surrogacy — regardless of the name given to the contract and its detailed terms — constitutes the sale of a child within the meaning of Article 2 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography of May 25, 2000. The letter’s argument is simple: the object of a surrogacy contract is never the pregnancy itself, but the child, who is to be handed over to the commissioning parties after birth. No commissioning party would agree to pay a surrogate mother solely for the period of pregnancy she has undergone if the child were not to be handed over to them. The letter’s authors emphasize that even so-called altruistic surrogacy is often accompanied by compensation and reimbursement of costs which in practice constitute a hidden form of payment.

UN rapporteurs and EU law already confirm this

The letter recalls positions that have for years pointed in the same direction. The UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, stated as early as 2017 in a report that the practice of commercial surrogacy “often amounts to the sale of children,” and a year later devoted a separate report to the issue, analyzing when surrogacy contracts meet the criteria for the sale of a child.

At the EU level, Directive 2011/36/EU, as amended by Directive (EU) 2024/1712, explicitly lists “the exploitation of surrogacy” among the acts that member states are obliged to criminalize as forms of human trafficking. In turn, on October 10, 2025, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, presented a report in which she found that surrogacy involves the exploitation of and violence against women and children, and that even in its “altruistic” variant, the purported reimbursement of costs most often constitutes actual payment. The report called on states to take steps toward eliminating surrogacy in all its forms and to develop a binding international instrument banning this practice.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child itself has also repeatedly expressed concern about the link between surrogacy and the sale of children in its concluding observations addressed to, among others, the United States, India, Mexico and Israel. In guidelines of September 10, 2019, the Committee confirmed that surrogacy “may also constitute the sale of children.” The letter proposes clarifying this line of interpretation: paid surrogacy, whether direct or indirect, should by definition constitute the sale of a child.

What is the coalition demanding?

The letter’s signatories ask the Committee on the Rights of the Child for three actions: to confirm that paid surrogacy constitutes the sale of children within the meaning of the Optional Protocol; to call on states parties to adopt legislative measures protecting children from being subjected to surrogacy; and to encourage the development of an international instrument aimed at the global abolition of this practice. The letter’s authors stress that all surrogacy — paid or not — violates the rights of the child under the Convention, but it is precisely the element of payment that additionally makes it the sale of a child and deepens the harm the child suffers.

“An ever-wider group of actors in the international arena now speaks with one voice: surrogacy reduces the child to the role of the object of a contract, and this is irreconcilable with the child’s dignity and legal personhood. The Ordo Iuris Institute’s endorsement of this letter is a natural continuation of our engagement to date in the work of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. This is not about creating new law, but about enforcing the obligations that states have already assumed by ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol,” notes Julia Książek of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law.

On September 12–13, the Ukrainian company BioTexCom plans to hold a conference in Warsaw aimed at promoting programs offering surrogate motherhood and in vitro fertilization. The company invites interested parties to individual meetings with its representatives, offering surrogacy packages worth nearly 65,000 euros. In response, the Ordo Iuris Institute has prepared a petition to Poland’s Prosecutor General asking that the matter be placed under senior supervisory oversight, that proceedings be initiated against BioTexCom under Article 211a of the Polish Criminal Code and Article 88 of the Act on Infertility Treatment, and that steps be taken to prevent the event from being held in the announced form.

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Source of cover photo: iStock