The High Court has refused a discovery application by two anonymised applicants seeking documents about entries in Ireland’s Register of Intercountry Adoptions involving Mexico.
The motion, dated 31 July 2013, sought documents relating to entries made since the Adoption Act 2010 began, including entries concerning adoptions effected in Mexico or children habitually resident there, and applications for those entries.
The applicants were seeking to have a child, identified only as R., registered after the Adoption Authority of Ireland refused their application. They had been assessed as eligible prospective adopters and had begun arranging a proposed adoption in Mexico before Ireland ratified the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption on 1 November 2010. Mexico had ratified it in 1995.
After the Convention took effect for Ireland, the applicants arranged the proposed adoption with R.’s mother in Mexico. A local Mexican court made an adoption order. According to the judgment, that court declined to issue a separate Article 23 Convention certificate, saying it would incorporate the certificate into the deed of adoption. The applicants returned to Ireland with R. on 17 April 2011 and applied on 15 May 2011 to have the adoption entered on the Register of Foreign Adoptions. The Authority refused, leading to the proceedings.
The applicants said the requested documents would help establish whether the Authority had power to recognise the Mexican adoption, why it considered it lacked that power, and which provisions of the Act it relied on. They also argued that the child’s best interests should guide the discovery decision.
Justice Henry Abbott distinguished the interests of R. from those of children whose details appeared in the register entries or documents sought. Applying the statutory privacy provisions, the court concluded that the relevant best-interests test concerned the children to whom those records related. It relied on the context of sections 86 and 88 of the 2010 Act and on an earlier High Court decision concerning adoption records.
The ruling was limited to the discovery motion. The court refused the application for documents; it did not determine whether the Authority had power to recognise or register the adoption.