Alegría Borrás, the legal side of adoption
Alegría Borrás, a teacher, represented our country at the the Hague Conference on International Adoption. As a result of this Conference, in May 1993 the so-called The Hague Agreement on International Adoption appeared in a large number of countries, Spain being one of them. In this interview, Alegría Borrás, one of the highest authorities in our country on private international law, tells us about these changes, as well as on some gaps that still remain in the present Spanish legislation on adoption. These are some of her statements:
"Simple adoption is problematic, specially when the child moves to another country, when here we do not have a concrete legal mechanism for transformation. People are faced with many problems; it is understood that this kind of adoption is equivalent to a preadoptive fostering or that it is only a reason for excluding the proposal of adoption by the public authority... that is to say, a series of matters that only present problems... I have always said that it would be positive to have a mechanism to articulate these formulae. For instance, in relation to the very same Hague Agreement, there is the subject concerning the fact that adoptions, although simple, if they establish some specific bounds even when there is no absolute break with the family of origin, then, there should be an automatic acknowledgement of them. Indeed, we cannot carry out an automatic acknowledgement of a simple adoption because we do not have this mechanism and we also do not have a mechanism for transformation. Our legislation should have this legal mechanism for transformation; this would make things much easier."
"With the system of the The Hague Agreement, the situation is much easier since with it, if the previous procedure has not been carried out, the mechanisms for acknowledgement do not work. For this reason, what cannot happen in the case of a child coming from a state belonging to the The Hague Agreement is that the child arrives here without having completed the previous formalities. With it I mean, and I think that this is very important because it is still not working well enough, that between states participating in The Hague Agreement, the previous suitability rapport is not a requirement that can be easily rectified, because it is a part of the previous procedure. This means that this child cannot be documented, that this child cannot leave his/her country, that he/she cannot come to Spain as the requirements of the Agreement have not been complied with, this adoption is not acknowledged and cannot be rectified. The subsequent suitability rapport and, therefore, the possibility of coming here, as well as all the problems that this is causing can in effect only happen when the Agreement is not applied."