2026 Theses Bachelor's

Institutional Corruption in Intercountry Adoption: Child Rights Abuses and the Limits of International Law

Fast, Mary

This thesis examines how intercountry adoption systems, though framed in a humanitarian perspective, can become sites of corruption, trafficking, and rights violations. It asks how institutional corruption produces child rights abuses in adoption systems, and why international legal safeguards ultimately fail to prevent these outcomes.

It then argues that institutional corruption within intercountry adoption systems is structural rather than incidental, and directly produces child rights abuses through financial incentives, falsified documentation, and weak oversight. It further argues that international law relies too heavily on formal legality in institutions where actors may already be compromised.

Using the Hunan Baby Buying Scandal from 2002 to 2005, it analyzes how bureaucratic procedures, falsified documentation practices, and financial incentives transformed trafficked children into commodities and legally adoptable subjects. It concludes that corruption should be understood as a structural human rights issue within intercountry adoption, and that international law fails because of its dependence on formal procedure and documentation when those institutions are already corrupt.