The child’s right to identity: complex challenges for family law

Abstract The UNCRC is the first international human rights treaty to explicitly recognise the child’s right to identity, which includes nationality, name, and family relations. The UNCRC, however, neither defines the notion of identity, nor explains what family relations mean. At the same time, issues on the child's right to identity in family law context are becoming increasingly important, largely due to the development of ART, which raise difficult legal and ethical questions. Among them: who is a child’s parent, and who may be considered part of child’s family. Although there seems to be a broad consensus that a child shall have access to origins, there is still no clarity on how to ensure such right, how to balance it with the genetic parent’s right to privacy, and what is the right age at which a child can exercise this right. Finally, what legal implications will recognition of the child’s right to access information on origins entail? Responses to these challenges vary significantly across jurisdictions, and it is no exaggeration to say that none of these questions has yet been resolved clearly or consistently. While this article does not claim to resolve all the complexities surrounding the child’s right to identity in family relations context, it seeks to propose at least an approach for addressing some of the most pressing questions.