· At the request of the FEMM Committee (Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality), the European Parliament has focused on the impact of 'intimate partner' violence on women and children and on custody rights.

• The Ordo Iuris Institute is representing a Polish child who fell victim to a paedophile in Norway.

• The Norwegian authority for children – Barnevernet – took the child away from his parents solely on the basis of unverified information about alleged domestic violence.

• The ECHR issued a further three judgments in which is directly referred to the ‘amicus curiae’ opinions sent by the Institute. 

• The Strasbourg Court rejected the complaint of a female couple claiming that their right to respect for family life had been violated by Iceland’s refusal to recognise them as the mothers of a child born to a commercial arrangement with an American surrogate.

The European Commission intends to implement a regulation demanding from Member States to acknowledge foreign adoptions of children by single-sex partnerships. However, the EU is not competent to interfere in family law.

Effective life and family protection requires joint actions at an international level. This issue was discussed at the conference on the Geneva Consensus Declaration.