Cour de cassation, Assemblée plénière, 3 July 2026, Appeal No. 24-50.028

On 3 July 2026, the French Cour de cassation, sitting in its most solemn formation, answered a question that has followed French families formed through surrogacy for more than a decade: when a foreign court has lawfully declared the intended parents to be a child’s legal parents, can France refuse to recognize that judgment simply because surrogacy is prohibited on French soil?

The answer, carefully framed and carefully limited, is no. The French prohibition of surrogacy stands untouched. But French courts cannot apply that ban in isolation. Where a child’s identity, private life, and legal security are at stake, the ban alone is not enough to refuse recognition of a foreign parentage judgment.

For French families and international intended parents, the decision offers meaningful legal clarity at a critical point in the journey: not by changing French surrogacy law, but by confirming that parentage lawfully established abroad may be recognized in France when the required safeguards are met.

The case behind the ruling

Two French men living in Canada became parents through surrogacy there, where the practice is lawful. Their child was born in February 2011, conceived using the gametes of one of the fathers and donor eggs. Shortly after the birth, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice declared both men to be the child’s legal parents and confirmed that the woman who carried him was not his mother. A Canadian birth certificate followed.

Years later, the fathers asked the French courts for two things: exequatur of the Ontario judgment, and a declaration that, once recognized, it would produce in France the effects of a full adoption (adoption plénière). Exequatur is the procedure by which a foreign court decision is reviewed by a French judge and, if it meets the conditions for recognition, given legal force in France. Absent an applicable treaty, the judge checks three things: whether the foreign court had a proper connection to the case, whether the decision respects French international public policy in both substance and procedure, and whether there was fraud. The judge does not retry the case.

The Paris tribunal judiciaire refused in 2023. The Paris Court of Appeal reversed course in June 2024 and granted both requests. The public prosecutor appealed, and the case was sent to the Assemblée plénière, a signal that the Court intended to settle the question with authority.

What the Court actually held

FIRST, the prohibition on surrogacy in France remains in effect. The ban set out in Articles 16-7 and 16-9 of the Civil Code is an essential principle of French law and part of French international public policy. Nothing in this ruling permits surrogacy in France, validates surrogacy contracts under French law, or softens the legal risks of attempting the practice domestically. Anyone reading this decision as a legalization of surrogacy is reading it wrong.

SECOND, the ban alone cannot justify a refusal of exequatur. This is the heart of the ruling. French international public policy is not made up solely of the surrogacy ban. It also includes the rights France has promised to guarantee under the European Convention on Human Rights, among them the child’s right to respect for private life, which covers identity and parentage. The Court treated those rights as part of public policy itself, to be reconciled with the ban in a single analysis rather than as a separate afterthought. The child’s best interests must be a primary consideration.

From there, the conclusion followed. This child already had parentage lawfully established by a Canadian court. Refusing to recognize it would leave him in legal limbo, and the Court tested the alternatives one by one. None worked. Refusal would block transcription of the birth certificate, which is legally inseparable from the judgment behind it. Adoption offered no way through either: the spouse cannot adopt without a recognized parent-child bond for the biological father, and the biological father cannot adopt his own child. Even a halfway solution, recognizing the biological father but not the intended father, would distort the foreign judgment. French law simply has no procedure to rebuild this child’s parentage with the security and speed his best interests demand.

None of this means judgments get waved through. Exequatur review remains a real check. French judges can still act on substantive concerns that emerge from the file, including human trafficking, fraud, and the child’s interest in access to information about their origins.

And recognition is anything but automatic, as this very case proves. A foreign decision that states no reasons cannot be recognized unless the applicant produces documents that fill the gap. In surrogacy cases, that requirement has a clear focus: the judge must be able to identify everyone who took part in the surrogacy project and verify that the parties, first and foremost the surrogate, consented to the agreement, its terms, and its effects on their parental rights. The Paris Court of Appeal was quashed on exactly this point. It had accepted the court paperwork as sufficient without verifying the surrogate’s consent.

THIRD, a recognized foreign judgment produces its own effects, not those of an adoption. The exequatur judge is not permitted to alter the meaning of the decision under review. The Ontario judgment established parentage directly; it was not an adoption judgment and cannot be converted into one. Once recognized, the parentage it establishes exists in France as such, with the effects the law attaches to it.

How the case ended

The Court decided the matter itself rather than sending it back. The surrogacy agreement, produced before the Cour de cassation, showed that the surrogate had consented to the arrangement and to relinquishing her parental rights over the child to be born. That closed the procedural gap. The Court granted exequatur, confirmed that the child’s parent-child relationships with both fathers may be entered in the French civil status registers, and rejected the fathers’ request to treat the judgment as a full adoption. That rejection takes nothing from the family: their parentage is recognized directly, exactly as the Canadian court established it, rather than rebuilt through a French adoption.

What the decision may suggest for the future

Read alongside the First Civil Chamber’s rulings of late 2024 and the Mennesson line of cases before them, the decision consolidates a coherent pathway. Where a foreign court judgment establishes the intended parents’ legal parentage, exequatur now offers a clarified, court-endorsed route to recognition in France, and the judgment, once recognized, stands on its own terms. That is a meaningful form of legal security: the parentage recognized is the parentage established by the foreign court, not a French reconstruction of the family through adoption.

The ruling also suggests where scrutiny will concentrate. Not on the fact that a surrogacy occurred, but on the quality of the foreign proceeding. Judgments that are properly reasoned, that establish the surrogate’s consent to the agreement, its terms, and its effects on her parental rights, and that clearly identify all parties are likely to be better positioned. Thin or purely formulaic foreign orders may face harder questions.

What remains uncertain

Several boundaries are still unsettled, and honesty about them serves families better than false confidence. The decision concerns foreign court judgments. It does not resolve the position of children whose parentage abroad rests on an administrative act or on the operation of foreign law without a judicial decision. The precise threshold that a foreign judgment must meet, particularly for pre-birth orders or jurisdictions with lighter judicial involvement, will be determined on a case-by-case basis. The relationship between the exequatur route and the transcription route for foreign birth certificates will continue to generate questions in practice. And the decision has already drawn criticism from those who consider it an erosion of the surrogacy ban, so a legislative response, while speculative, cannot be excluded.

Practical takeaways

• Families holding a foreign parentage judgment now have a clarified, court-endorsed route to recognition in France. Whether exequatur is advisable in a given case depends on the judgment’s content and the family’s circumstances and deserves individual assessment.
• Documentation is the currency of recognition. A reasoned foreign judgment, the underlying agreement, and clear evidence that the surrogate consented both to its terms and to its effects on her parental rights are what a French judge will look for.
• The foreign procedure shapes the French outcome. From a French recognition perspective, jurisdictions that establish parentage through a reasoned court decision may offer firmer footing than systems that rely solely on contract or administrative registration, though recognition will remain fact-specific in every case.
• Nothing has changed inside France. Surrogacy remains prohibited on French territory, and this decision creates no opening for domestic arrangements.

A closing word

This ruling brings welcome clarity to families whose parentage was lawfully established abroad, and it does so without disturbing the French prohibition of surrogacy itself. For French families and international intended parents, that clarity is important. It may help future and ongoing journeys feel more secure, not because recognition is automatic, but because the Court has confirmed that a foreign parentage judgment cannot be refused solely because the child was born through surrogacy.

Recognition under this framework remains conditional and fact-sensitive, with outcomes depending on details that vary from one judgment, country, and family to the next. No article, this one included, can substitute for advice tailored to your situation. If your family was formed through surrogacy abroad, or you are advising clients who were, the right next step is a careful review of your specific documents with counsel experienced in international parentage recognition, including qualified French counsel when recognition in France is at issue.