Final stretch for adoption reform

Almost two years after it was tabled by the then Minister of Justice, Sam Tanson (déi gréng), the adoption reform is entering the final stages before it is approved by the Chamber of Deputies. This week, the Justice Committee is examining the additional opinion of the Council of State on the amendments made last December. If it follows the Council of State's proposals for reformulation, the bill will be able to return to the Chamber's agenda for adoption before the summer.

But why has this process taken so long? The bill is only three pages long, precisely in order to facilitate its passage through the legislative process and, above all, to get it through the House before the end of the DP-LSAP-déi gréng majority legislature. Mrs Tanson had given up on a major reform including adoption and filiation, the intricacies of which took a long time to untangle and the content of which was quite touchy, in order to extract the long-awaited modernisation of adoption.

Unfortunately, the bill has ended up drowning in the mass of bills that will be sent to the Conseil d'État in the spring of 2023. As it was neither urgent nor a priority – which is not the view of those waiting to adopt – it was not examined until a year later, as the Journal noted in its article on the struggle of a single woman to adopt on her own.