A critical yet often overlooked issue in addressing the challenges faced by children fleeing conflict is the recognition of their personal status—particularly the legal effect given in the receiving country to relationships with parents, guardians, or spouses that were validly established abroad. Conflict disrupts life trajectories, including family structures and personal status. Families are often forced to relocate to countries where these legally established relationships are not recognized or are considered invalid.

Receiving states must then grapple with the complex task of determining how to grant legal recognition to foreign institutions that may be unfamiliar or incompatible with their own legal frameworks—all while maintaining the coherence and identity of their domestic legal systems. While such questions can arise in cross-border movements in times of peace, conflict situations bring them into sharper focus, exposing how differences in legal systems can place children in increasingly precarious positions.

The cases of kafalah and surrogacy illustrate the particular difficulties involved in transferring a legal status across borders into jurisdictions where such arrangements may be prohibited or unfamiliar. In response to these challenges, families often seek to establish a new legal status in the receiving country—an approach that can, in some respects, undermine the child’s best interests and lead to the loss of essential safeguards. This underscores the urgent need for states to facilitate the recognition of personal status validly established abroad.

Starting from the assumption that cross-border placement of children may be a measure of protection to children living in territories where wars are taking place, the paper aims at considering whether the legal framework of reference is “fit” for purpose.
Cross-border placement of children is regulated by the 1996 Hague Convention and the Brussels II ter Regulation: both instruments were conceived as instrument concerning parental responsibility matters, focusing more on the private side of family relations.
Their “public side” is becoming more relevant, not only due to migration flows, but due to the ongoing wars around the world.
The Brussels II ter Regulation has introduced relevant novelties on the intra-EU cross-border placement of children. As far as the 1996 Hague Convention’s regime is concerned, during the last Special Session problems in the application of art. 33 have been pointed out and a Working group will be appointed to deal with them.
In light of the above, the paper will consider the relevant legal framework of reference with a view to grant protection to children living in war conditions, but also to protect their fundamental right to identity and to family life.

Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, offering a haven for refugee children and those orphaned internationally. However, past child welfare and legal practices in Australia have had a profoundly negative impact on generations of our First Nations’ children, British Migrant children, children in care and children forcibly removed and coercively adopted.
As a country, all our national apologies have related to the past ill-treatment of children, which were legally and politically condoned.
This presentation discusses how contemporary Australian responses to children orphaned by war, internecine conflict and by circumstance have been shaped by those past practices and, what we still need to do to protect the rights of orphans at law. Some orphaned children in Australia are cared for under the auspices of the state Refugee Minor Programs, with remarkably positive outcomes. Others enter Australia with no guardians, oversight, or access to services they need. Critically, many orphaned children enter Australia without any judicial review, administrative oversight, or delegation of their guardianship. This presentation examines the legal tensions inherent in child guardianship in Australia and whether orphaned children are disadvantaged by lack of legal guardianship. It discusses whether Australia is in fact satisfying the mandates for the care of orphaned children stipulated under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and why access to legal protections and resilience-based case management approaches with orphaned children are critical to ensuring they are cared for as their parents would have wished.