Adoption law is built around protection. International standards, including the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention, require adoption to serve the child’s best interests and fundamental rights. Yet the long-term legal effects of adoption can raise a different human rights question: when an adopted person has reached adulthood, should the state treat legal separation from the biological family as a reason to prevent even a carefully mediated notification from a biological parent?
The question is broader than one legal system. European human rights case law on anonymous birth, access to origins and parentage shows the recurring tension between privacy, family stability and identity. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has mostly approached this tension from the perspective of the person seeking to know his or her origins. Less attention has been given to the reverse situation: a biological parent who seeks only to make their existence and wish for contact known, while leaving the adult adoptee entirely free to respond or not.
A case from Kosovo illustrates the problem. In KI01/21, Ajshe Aliu asked the authorities to inform her adult biological child, given up for adoption decades earlier, of her existence and wish to establish contact. The request was rejected by the administrative authorities and courts. The Constitutional Court examined the matter under the right to private life, including Article 8 ECHR standards, and found no violation.
The broader issue is not whether a biological parent should be able to compel contact. It is whether human rights law should recognise a procedural space between forced reunion and complete institutional silence. That space can be described as notification without obligation.
Identity after legal separation
Adoption changes legal relationships and secures the stability of the adoptive family. But legal separation does not erase personal history. Biological parenthood may remain part of a person’s identity, memory and moral biography, just as knowledge of origins may matter to an adopted person’s self-understanding.
Autonomy therefore operates in both directions. An adult adoptee must be free to refuse contact and protect an existing family identity. But autonomy also has an informational dimension: a person cannot choose whether to refuse, ignore or explore a biological connection if the state ensures that the existence of the request never reaches them. The question is not whether the adoptee must answer, but who should make the decision that the information will never be received: the adult concerned, or the state in advance.
What Article 8 ECHR helps us see
The ECtHR has repeatedly treated identity, family history and biological origins as interests falling within private life under Article 8. In Odièvre v France, the Court accepted that access to information about one’s origins concerns private life while allowing France a margin of appreciation in balancing competing interests. In Godelli v Italy, it found that an absolute barrier to obtaining information about origins failed to strike a fair balance. In Jäggi v Switzerland, it emphasised the importance of knowing one’s parentage as part of personal identity.
These cases differ from a biological mother seeking to make herself known. They nevertheless show why a categorical answer is problematic. Article 8 does not require a right to reunion, but its concern with identity, autonomy and proportionality supports an individualised procedure capable of weighing the biological parent’s interest, the adult adoptee’s privacy and the stability of the adoptive family.
Notification without obligation
The distinction between contact and notification is crucial. Contact creates an interaction; notification only informs an adult that a biological relative has expressed a wish to be known. A neutral authority can transmit such a message without disclosing addresses, personal data or family information and without requiring any response.
Such a model would not give biological parents access to addresses, personal data or private family information. It would not require the adult adoptee to meet, speak or reply. It would only place the choice where autonomy suggests it should be: with the adult person concerned. The adoptee could refuse, ignore, postpone or accept further communication. The law would protect privacy not by hiding the existence of the request, but by ensuring that any response remains entirely voluntary.
This approach also respects the social reality of adoption. Adoptive families should not be destabilised by legal uncertainty or external claims. But adult adoptees are no longer children whose choices must be fully mediated by parental authority. Where the person is an adult, the state’s protective function should gradually shift from shielding to enabling informed self-determination.
International children’s rights law also points in this direction. The Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises, as far as possible, the child’s right to know and be cared for by his or her parents and the right to preserve identity, including family relations. These provisions do not answer every adoption question, especially once the child is an adult. But they reinforce the idea that identity cannot be reduced to legal status alone.
The role of the state: mediator, not silencer
This is not merely theoretical. In England and Wales, official intermediary services may assist adopted adults and birth relatives in tracing one another, while contact depends on the wishes of the person approached. The Adoption Contact Register likewise allows adopted people and birth relatives to record wishes concerning contact. These mechanisms are not a universal model, but they demonstrate that legal systems need not choose only between secrecy and forced reunion. The state can mediate, protect personal data and leave the final decision with the adult adoptee.
International children’s rights law points in the same general direction. Articles 7 and 8 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child connect identity with knowledge of parents and preservation of family relations. Although these provisions concern children and do not resolve the position of an adult adoptee, they reinforce the proposition that identity cannot be reduced entirely to formal legal status.
Why Kosovo matters beyond one case
The Kosovo example is especially instructive because the ECHR is directly applicable under Article 22 of the Constitution of Kosovo, while Article 53 requires constitutional human rights provisions to be interpreted consistently with ECtHR case law. KI01/21 therefore raises a wider question for constitutional systems that encompass ECHR standards: does a fair balance require more than asking whether domestic law expressly grants a biological parent a right of contact?
A more proportionate approach would distinguish a claimed right to contact from a request that a neutral authority consider transmitting a message. The biological mother would receive no automatic identifying information and could not compel a meeting or reply. The adult adoptee would retain the final choice. What the legal system would avoid is treating silence as the only possible form of protection.
Conclusion
Adoption law must protect adult adoptees, adoptive families and legal certainty. But protection should not automatically mean silence. Biological motherhood does not override adoption, and Article 8 need not create a substantive right to reunion. A modest procedural right to have a request considered and, where appropriate, transmitted without obligation would better reflect identity, autonomy, privacy and proportionality. It would not impose family life; it would create the conditions for informed choice. In questions of biological identity, that may be the most humane role the state can play.
Bio
Flamur Hyseni is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Prishtina.