Free Market of Human Beings
Recently the European Court of Human Rights (“Court”) delivered a decision in the case Paradiso and Campanelli v. Italy. The applicants - who were Italian nationals - after unsuccessful in vitro fertilisation treatments decided to try resorting to assisted reproduction techniques and to a surrogate mother in Russia. The child was born in Moscow in 2011 and arrived to Italy a few months later. The Italian authorities refused to register the Russian birth certificate and the child was removed from the applicants. The Court reduced its analysis to the notion of “private life”, inherent in the Article 8 of the European Convention. What is really striking with the reasoning is the omission of the Court to recognize the relevance of the international law instruments designed against human trafficking.