The Hague Convention is often presented as a neutral legal framework designed to resolve international child abduction cases. Yet for many women affected by domestic abuse, migration and cross-border families, the reality is very different. This webinar explores two seemingly opposite experiences. In Turkey, migrant women become trapped in a foreign country, isolated from family, support networks and services, while facing domestic abuse and the threat of losing their children. In Lithuania, local mothers can find themselves losing custody and contact with their children to foreign fathers, despite remaining in their own country. Through these contrasting experiences, we will explore the common patterns that emerge when women’s safety, children’s wellbeing and international family law collide.
As France looks ahead to its 2027 presidential election, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has thrust surrogacy back into the center of the country’s political debate.
Attal, who announced his presidential bid in May and now leads President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, has called for a national debate on legalizing surrogacy, which remains prohibited under French law. He has openly linked the issue to his personal desire to have children with his partner, European Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné, a former French foreign minister, through surrogacy.
The proposal places Attal at odds with Macron, who has repeatedly described the legalization of surrogacy as a “red line.”
With Macron constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term, Attal’s position has emerged as one of the clearest bioethical dividing lines in the race to succeed him.
Transgender prisoners are being moved to jails according to their biological sex, after the Scottish government confirmed it would not appeal a legal ruling.
On Friday, Lady Ross ruled that Scottish Prison Service (SPS) guidance allowing transgender prisoners to be held in jails for the opposite sex was unlawful based on a Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman in equality law.
Justice Secretary Neil Gray said the government accepted the ruling and work was now underway to implement the transfer of prisoners.
The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) withdrew its transgender policy, first implemented in 2014, on Monday.
Susan Smith, a director at For Women Scotland, said they remained “horrified” that SPS ever thought its policy of putting males in women’s prisons was “morally justified, let alone lawful”.
“Sadly, the statement issued by the minister focused on the men who are to be moved, with no reference to the women who have suffered under this iniquitous policy and who deserve a fulsome apology and an acknowledgement of the harm and trauma they suffered,” she said.
The class-action lawsuit brought against the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) demanding to house all trans-identified male inmates in women’s prisons was brought by a pedophile, a rapist, and a domestic abuser who murdered his girlfriend, Reduxx can reveal. At the end of April, a federal judge ordered the ODOC to reassess its policies and house trans-identified males on the basis of their “gender identity” in a sweeping injunction.
Inmate “J.F.” is Jessica Anne Marie Foust, previously known as John Jay Chapman. He has been designated as a “vulnerable” inmate by the ODOC, and asserts that he is “a legal female.”
In 2008, Chapman was sentenced to 25 years in prison for raping a developmentally disabled woman who resided at an adult foster home in Gresham, Oregon, managed by his mother. While incarcerated, Chapman was convicted on four counts of assaulting a correctional officer. Three years later, in 2015, he began to identify as transgender.
The class action suit also includes the experiences of inmates identified as “Z.Z.” and “L.B.” Reduxx can identify Z.Z. and L.B. as “Zera Lola Zombie” and “Lillithia Moon Blood-Gaia.”
Zombie, born Daniel Lee Smith, is a violent trans-identified male who is classified as a “female” inmate in the Oregon inmate directory and is housed in women’s prison Coffee Creek Correctional Facility (CCCF). He is serving a 35-year sentence for charges including the brutal murder of his girlfriend, Samantha Brown. In 2014, Brown was beaten to death, her corpse left in the trailer home she and Zombie shared. While the motive for the crime was never made clear, Brown was survived by four young children.
“Lillithia Moon Blood-gaia”, identified in the suit as “L.B.”, was previously known as Nova June Gaia and Joseph Daniel Neilson. Gaia is a convicted pedophile who was first arrested in 2018 at a property in Portland, Oregon after being reported for sexually assaulting a child he was babysitting. The exact nature of the relationship between Gaia and the victim is being withheld by Reduxx for the purposes of protecting the child’s identity and safety.
When placed in custody, Gaia’s legal sex was male and he had a full beard. But despite there being no indication Gaia identified as transgender prior to his arrest, in July of 2019, while awaiting sentencing, Gaia submitted an inquiry to his jail asking when he would be transferred to Coffee Creek — Oregon’s only women’s prison.
[W]hile people with intersex variations are included as the “I” in the umbrella term LGBTQI+, they are often overlooked or misunderstood. Having innate variations of sex characteristics is not a sexuality and is not about gender or identity.
Sex registration is based on physical appearance. If sex is uncertain, doctors apply a set of rules to make a decision, including expected outcomes from surgeries to make genitals more masculine. This often leads to female registration and feminising surgeries, on the basis that it is easier to “make a hole but you can’t build a pole”. Early surgery may not align with the child’s future wishes.
[I]ntersex is often conflated with being transgender. Sometimes this is a product of simplistic and unhelpful media reporting.
Sometimes this is the product of institutional policies. For example, many women and girls with a Y chromosome, registered female at birth and subjected to feminising surgeries in childhood in public hospitals without their consent, are now being told they are “biological males” and don’t belong in women’s spaces.
Sometimes this is a product of longstanding errors in Australian federal guidelines, which have wrongly defined intersex as people who “identify as neither male nor female”. This impacts passports, health records and other government documents.
In 2020, the Australian Bureau of Statistics set out better practices for government data. Its standard detaches variations of sex characteristics from classifications of sex and gender. But federal and some state governments have been slow to implement this change.
Harmful medical experiences, stigma, misinformation and lack of transparency have all made it hard to talk about being intersex, difficult to access safe, informed and accessible services, and hard to collect data on the experiences and needs of adults with innate variations. This needs to change.
JK Rowling said that taking down WPATH would be the gender critical Battle of Stalingrad, and here’s what makes this case more than just another skirmish in an endless war. The evidence for it arrives on three separate levels, any one of which would be damning on its own. Put together, they close every exit for the trans movement.
The first level is what WPATH told the public, in writing, under its own name. That medical transition is “medically necessary,” not cosmetic, not elective, but necessary in the way insulin is necessary. That it’s “lifesaving.” That puberty blockers are “fully reversible.” That cross-sex hormones improve mental health, that mastectomies on teenage girls are safe and effective and reliably raise their quality of life, that the whole programme prevents suicide. These are the talking points you hear from trans activists every day. It’s signed, it’s dated, and WPATH can’t disown a word of it.
The second level is what those same people said in private, and it’s the one that rules out an honest mistake. Among themselves, the authors of the Standards of Care admitted that “a global consensus on puberty blockers does not exist” and that a recommendation was “not supported by the data.” A former board member, Dr Erica Anderson, has since conceded there’s barely any long-term research on what blockers do to a developing child. They claimed to use GRADE, the recognised system that forces every recommendation to carry an honest label of the evidence behind it. They rated the evidence for blockers “moderate.” Then, they deleted that rating from the final version, so a “strong recommendation” would imply the high-quality evidence they knew they didn’t have.
And then there are the age limits, which give the game away completely. The draft Standards had minimum ages for surgery. The office of Rachel Levine, at the top of Biden’s health department, leaned on WPATH to take them out, not because the evidence had changed but to deny critics a usable headline. One chapter author laid out the calculation in writing: leave the ages in and “the conservatives” will say WPATH supports “cutting off healthy girl breasts at 15 years old,” take them out and “it doesn’t give them the headline.”
The third level is what all of this did to real children. The case is built partly on sworn statements from the casualties. Detransitioners who were started on this path as kids and are now adults living in the result. Parents who were told to choose between a dead child and a living one. A woman who had her breasts cut off in Texas at fourteen, now grown, who gave written permission to publish the photograph of her scarred chest.
Take the three together and you can see why this is different in kind from everything that came before, because each level shuts a different escape route. The public claims kill any pretence that the language was careful or hedged. The private record kills the “wrong but well-meaning” defence, because they knew. The human evidence kills the idea that the harm was ever theoretical.
It’s worth saying plainly that this is a complaint and not a verdict. These are allegations; WPATH will fight them, and it may yet win. But a defendant whose own emails are the prosecution’s best material is not in a comfortable place.
A group of states has today launched a political declaration calling for an international moratorium on surrogacy, as part of broader efforts to promote the abolition of the practice in line with international human rights law.
Spearheaded by the governments of Italy and Chile, the declaration sets out a shared commitment to achieving the global abolition of surrogacy, promoting an international moratorium on the practice as a stepping stone towards an international legally binding instrument.
The declaration highlights the severe human rights violations and abuses inherent in surrogacy, noting especially the commodification of human life and women’s reproductive capabilities, as well as the harm to the rights of children caused by their deliberate separation from the women who carried and gave birth to them.
The document was presented at a high-level event held on the sidelines of the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council, co-hosted by the governments of Italy, Chile, Cameroon and the Holy See and moderated by ADF International.
Surrogacy market size in 2026 is estimated at USD 28.91 billion, growing from 2025 value of USD 23.66 billion with 2031 projections showing USD 78.68 billion, growing at 22.19% CAGR over 2026-2031.
Growth stems from delayed parenthood among millennials, higher infertility prevalence, and wider acceptance of diverse family structures. Legal reforms in the United States, Thailand, and several European countries are redrawing international patient flows, while rapid gains in in-vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates shorten treatment timelines.
Fertility centers continue to integrate artificial-intelligence embryo selection, cutting costs and increasing reliability. Cross-border demand is expanding toward lower-cost, regulation-light destinations in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia as intended parents search for clear parentage rules and favorable pricing.
IVI RMA Global, Virtus Health, Bourn Hall Clinic, Circle Surrogacy and New Hope Fertility Center are the major companies operating in this market.
Pleased to be co-organizing this side event with a number of States and civil society organizations on violence against mothers on the 25th of June from 13:00 to 14:00 CET.
