The principle that governs everything else
Applicants almost always arrive with the same sentence: we want a child. The law starts from the other end: here is a child without a family, who can provide one? That reversal is not a slogan. It has very concrete consequences — it is because a family is being sought for the child, and not the other way round, that applicants are assessed, ranked, kept waiting, and can be turned down without that being an injustice.
It also explains why no country recognises a right to a child. The European Court of Human Rights has said so repeatedly: Article 8 protects existing family life, it does not guarantee a right to found a family through adoption. Where a state does open adoption, however, it must do so without discrimination — and that, rather than any right to a child, is the ground on which the landmark cases have been decided.
Two broad families of adoption
| Full adoption | The child is transferred entirely to the new family. The original legal parentage is severed, a new birth record is issued, the surname changes, inheritance follows. It is irrevocable in almost every system. |
|---|---|
| Simple adoption | A new bond is added without erasing the old one. The child then has two legal parentages, sometimes inherits on both sides, and the adoption can be revoked for serious cause. This is the form used for older children, in blended families and between adults. |
Common-law countries think differently: they usually know only one adoption order, with full effect, and handle intermediate situations with other tools — guardianship, special guardianship, or kafala in Muslim-law countries, which entrusts a child without creating parentage.
The four real routes
- Step-parent adoption. By far the most common, and the least talked about. It secures a situation that already exists. It almost always requires the consent of the other birth parent, which is where the friction lies.
- Domestic adoption of a child in state care. Few babies, many older children, sibling groups and children with disabilities — what is politely called children with specific needs. Everywhere, the gap between approved applicants and children available runs from one to several dozen.
- Intercountry adoption. Down roughly 80 % since the early 2000s. That is not an administrative accident: it is the intended result of the Hague Convention and of the subsidiarity rule, which requires a solution to be sought first in the child's own country.
- Kinship adoption. An orphaned child taken in by an uncle or a grandmother. The court mainly asks whether adoption adds anything to guardianship.
The Hague Convention, plainly
Signed in 1993 and ratified by more than a hundred states, it does not create a right to adopt abroad. It organises a circuit: a central authority in each country, approval granted in the receiving country, matching decided in the country of origin, and automatic recognition of the decision in every other contracting state. In exchange it bans any payment beyond actual costs and imposes subsidiarity.
Adopting in a non-contracting country remains possible, but the foreign decision must then be recognised case by case in the receiving country, and that is where files stall for years. The practical rule fits in one sentence: never start a process without knowing whether the country of origin is a party to the Convention, and whether your own country still accepts files from it.
What applicants are asked
Criteria vary, but the assessment grid is remarkably stable: a minimum age, an age gap with the child, a minimum period of cohabitation for couples, no convictions for certain offences, health compatible with raising a child, sufficient means without any requirement of wealth, and housing. The social and psychological assessment usually takes six to twelve months and is less about the applicant's qualities than about their capacity to welcome a child who already has a history.
Three themes recur in refusals: a project grounded in infertility alone and not yet worked through, an idealised picture of the expected child, and an inability to accept that the child had other parents first.
Money
In most countries domestic adoption costs next to nothing: the procedure is public and free or nearly so. Intercountry adoption runs between £13,000 and £40,000 depending on country and agency, about half of it travel, accommodation and translation. Anything resembling a payment tied to the allocation of a child is illegal everywhere, without exception — and it is the single most important warning sign when choosing an intermediary.
Adoption and surrogacy
In many countries adoption has become the legal exit route from a surrogacy arrangement carried out abroad: the intended parent with no genetic link establishes parentage through step-parent adoption. It is a narrow, slow route, and it is refused outright in several states. It is dealt with separately, on the page devoted to surrogacy.
One last thing, rarely said
An adopted child is not a child without a past. Searching for origins, access to the file, and the question of what is said and at what age come back in adolescence, then in adulthood, often when the person has a child of their own. Access rights have opened up everywhere over the last twenty years; absolute file anonymity has disappeared from most systems. On this subject, adoptee-led associations are a more useful source than adoption agencies.
Same-sex couples
Four different questions arise, and a country can answer yes to one and no to the other three. Confusing them is the commonest source of unpleasant surprises.
- Joint adoption: the couple adopts a child with no prior connection to them. It is the narrowest door, and almost everywhere it assumes the couple is married.
- Step-parent adoption: adopting the partner's child. Several countries that refuse joint adoption allow this, because it merely secures a bond already lived.
- Direct establishment of parentage at birth, without adoption, where the child is born of assisted reproduction within the couple. Some countries recognise the second mother from birth; others still require an adoption procedure, slow and heavy, for a child the couple conceived together.
- Recognition of parentage established abroad, when the family moves or travels. This is the most insidious point: a parent-child link perfectly valid in the country of birth may have no effect elsewhere.
Agencies and countries of origin add their own filter: even where a country permits intercountry adoption by a same-sex couple, almost every country of origin refuses it, which in practice limits intercountry adoption to single applicants — and even then, conditionally.
Where same-sex relations are criminalised, none of these four routes exists, and adoption does not arise in the same terms. Each country page gives the exact position.
Two countries, two laws
A marriage celebrated abroad or with a foreigner, the law that governs the couple's property, children of two nationalities, an estate spread over two countries: the page on international couples gathers the common rules and explains the Hague Conventions.
The law country by country
The legal framework, the procedure, the time limits and the costs differ from one country to another. Each country below has a detailed page: governing texts, key facts, the actual procedure, costs, where to go and the traps to avoid.
Select a country to open its detailed page.