QQ v XX & Ors

In a step-parent adoption, the child’s lifelong welfare remains paramount and parental consent may be dispensed with only where welfare requires it. The proportionality assessment differs from a stranger adoption. The test is not whether nothing else will do, because the interference with family life may be substantially less where the order formalises an established family relationship.

Article 37(b) of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963 is not automatically engaged by appointing a children’s guardian to represent a foreign-national child in adoption proceedings. In any event, notification of the consulate is discretionary and turns on the facts. A possible lack of foreign recognition of an adoption order is a welfare factor, not a bar to making it.

The applicant sought a step-parent adoption order in respect of his adult stepdaughter. The application was made before her eighteenth birthday. It was supported by her, her mother, the children’s guardian and the local authority, but opposed by her birth father.

The court considered whether the appointment of a children’s guardian required notification to the consulate of the young person’s state of nationality under Article 37(b) of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963. It also considered the effect in that country of an English adoption order, which might not be recognised there, and whether the father’s consent should be dispensed with under the Adoption and Children Act 2002.

1. Application granted. The father’s consent was dispensed with because the young person’s welfare throughout her life required it. The court directed that an adoption order be made.

2. Article 37(b) of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963 was not automatically engaged. In its domestic statutory sense, a guardian of a child exercises a protective upbringing role and has parental responsibility. A children’s guardian appointed solely to represent the child’s interests in proceedings performs a materially different function. The provision was therefore inapplicable on the facts.

3. Even if Article 37(b) had applied, notification was not appropriate. The young person was an adult, understood the proceedings and her origins, and her father had been notified and had opposed the application. The consulate could add no material evidence or argument. The case was not a care case, there was no need to trace family members or consider transfer abroad, and notification risked prejudicial delay in the short period before she turned 19.

4. Under sections 1 and 52 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, welfare throughout life was paramount and proportionality was central. A step-parent adoption is qualitatively different from adoption by strangers. It may consolidate established de facto family ties and ordinarily entails a less severe interference with the Article 8 rights of the child and non-consenting parent. Accordingly, the nothing else will do formulation was not the applicable test.

5. The possible absence of recognition in Country F was a relevant welfare consideration, but not a prohibition on the order. The young person understood and accepted the uncertainty. Her overriding wish was for the applicant, who was her psychological father and had shared her upbringing since 2016, to be legally recognised as her father in this jurisdiction.

6. The father had played only a limited role in her later childhood, had not exercised parental responsibility in practice, and the order would have no practical effect on that responsibility now she was an adult. Her informed wishes carried almost decisive weight. The court also expressly considered contact under section 46(6); as an adult, she remained free to pursue contact with her father.

First-instance decision. The judgment records interlocutory directions and a declaration on 28 June 2022 that it was lawful and proportionate not to notify the Country F consulate, but no appellate history.