Improving mechanisms for the protection of children and ensuring their right to family-based upbringing

Draft Law #15438 of July 22, 2026

Who is affected: orphaned children and children deprived of parental care; children raised in round-the-clock care institutions; children left in maternity hospitals; children who are participants in criminal proceedings; parents in respect of whom the question of deprivation of rights or removal of a child has been raised; guardians, custodians, foster parents, parent-carers of family-type children’s homes, patronage carers, adoptive parents; children’s affairs services and guardianship authorities; the courts.

Initiators: the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

Summary:

Proposes a systemic reform of the state system for the protection of children’s rights, consisting of:

Deinstitutionalization:

• the placement of an orphaned child in a round-the-clock care institution becomes temporary by law and only for the period needed to create a foster family or living conditions close to family ones, but for no more than six months;
• from January 1, 2027, the establishment of new family-type children’s homes (FTCHs) ceases; instead, only foster families will be created, while existing FTCHs continue to operate;
• specialized foster families are introduced for children who require special care conditions;
• foster families with five or more children, and specialized families, are provided with an equipped residential house or apartment for the period of their operation, as well as the right to an assistant to the foster parents.

Institutional component:

• the State Service for Children’s Affairs is designated as the Central Authority under the 1996 Hague Convention. This change will enter into force 12 months after the termination or cancellation of martial law;
• the staffing standards for children’s affairs services and the requirements for their material and technical provision are revised;
• round-the-clock rapid response by children’s affairs services is provided for, including at night and on weekends and public holidays;
• a system of continuous professional development for staff is created.

Maternity hospitals:

• the discriminatory provision on the right of parents to leave a child with significant developmental impairments in a maternity hospital is revised — this is precisely the provision on which Ukraine received observations from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child;
• mandatory interagency cooperation between healthcare facilities and guardianship authorities is introduced in respect of a child whom parents intend to leave behind.

Parental rights:

• the right of a guardianship authority to apply to a court with a claim for deprivation of parental rights becomes an obligation, but only where grounds exist and the child cannot be protected by other means;
• a court may refuse to deprive parents of their rights if they have eliminated the causes that served as the grounds for applying to the court;
• valid reasons for the absence of parental care are set out in detail: illness, inpatient treatment, military service, captivity, detention in custody, residence in occupied territory;
• the guardianship authority is charged with providing social support to a family in which parents have been deprived of their rights;
• the procedure for the removal of a child is entirely rewritten, distinguishing four different scenarios;
• in the case of removal without deprivation of rights, the guardianship authority is obliged to arrange addiction treatment, a corrective program, and employment assistance for the parents.

Children’s rights:

• the right of a child to be heard without the presence of parents or other persons whose presence may affect the free expression of their opinion is enshrined;
• family disputes concerning a child’s given name, surname, place of residence, and the participation of parents in upbringing are transferred to the exclusive competence of the courts;
• child protection centers for conducting investigative actions in a child-friendly environment are established in law;
• corrective programs for parents with violent behavior become a basic social service.

Adoption:

• the age of children who may be adopted by foreigners is raised from 5 to 10 years;
• the right of brothers and sisters separated through adoption to maintain contact is enshrined;
• procedural deadlines for the courts are established and the period for appeal is shortened;
• the approach to the confidentiality of adoption is revised in favor of the child’s right to know their origin.

Patronage care:

• the requirement for a patronage carer to have a permanent income is abolished;
• exceeding the six-month period of a child’s stay in a patronage family is permitted if court proceedings or placement procedures are ongoing;
• the financing of patronage care from the state budget is clarified, as is the procedure for settlements between communities where a child is placed with a patronage family residing in another territorial community — this removes the situation in which a child ends up in an institution solely because no patronage carer is available in their own community.

What is right:

• The draft law is the most comprehensive attempt to reform the child protection system in many years, and it is backed by a financial and economic justification.
• A specific six-month period for children’s stay in round-the-clock care institutions is established. A specific deadline turns a declaration about deinstitutionalization into a legal obligation for the community to find the child a family.
• The abolition of the permanent income requirement for patronage carers: the state acknowledges that patronage care is paid work, and requiring a person to also have separate earnings meant cutting off precisely those ready to devote all their time to it.
• Guarantees of the child’s right to be heard are strengthened. The right of a child to be heard without their parents closes an obvious gap: an opinion expressed in the presence of the person who holds power over the child is not the child’s own opinion. This is the basic standard of Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Ukraine is finally implementing substantively rather than formally.
• The detailed list of valid reasons for the absence of parental care takes the circumstances of the war into account. Parents being on military service, in captivity, in custody, or in temporarily occupied territory will not in itself be equated with a deliberate failure to fulfill parental duties.
• The obligation of the guardianship authority to support a family after deprivation of rights and to provide parents with addiction treatment when a child is removed represents a shift from punitive logic to restorative logic. A child is not taken away permanently by default; the state is obliged to try to return the child to the family, having first treated that family.

What is wrong:

• The elimination of family-type children’s homes from 2027 is the most debatable decision. The real risk here lies not in the number of children per family, but in the transition itself from one model to another. The law names a date but establishes no indicator of the readiness of the foster family system by that moment: how many candidates must be trained, how much housing equipped, how many assistants hired, what volume of funding allocated, whether there will be enough specialists for professional support. The date exists; the readiness is not in sight. This is critical because FTCHs and foster families differ not only in scale but also in logic: the FTCH was created as a form for large groups, in particular for brothers and sisters who cannot be separated. If a foster family model of comparable capacity does not emerge by 2027, a legislative ban on establishing FTCHs will not create new families — it will merely remove one of the existing instruments. And then children for whom FTCHs would previously have been created will be placed wherever a possibility remains, that is, in institutions.
• The six-month limit will become a fiction unless it is backed by resources. If a community has no foster families, a child will either remain in an institution in formal violation of the deadline, or be moved to another community, severing all social ties. The provision requires a parallel campaign to recruit foster parents, and the document partly provides for this, but the pace of creating families is not synchronized with the pace at which the ban takes effect.
• Raising the age for foreign adoption from 5 to 10 substantially narrows the chances of a family for children aged 5–10 who have not been adopted in Ukraine. The motivation is clear — priority for national adoption and control under wartime conditions. But the consequence may not be that these children are adopted by Ukrainians, but that they remain in the system for another five years. The provision requires justification with statistical data: how many children of this age are actually adopted in Ukraine each year.
• The transfer of Central Authority functions under the 1996 Hague Convention is postponed for an indefinitely long period. Ukrainian children are abroad now, and questions of parental responsibility and protection arise now. Postponing the designation of the Central Authority until a year after the end of martial law appears excessively cautious: it is precisely during wartime that the need for stable links with the competent authorities of foreign states is greatest.
• Round-the-clock operation of children’s affairs services, including on weekends, is the right requirement, but it runs up against staffing and financial provision. A revision of headcount standards is envisaged, yet without guaranteed funding from local budgets the provision will create workload without resources, and therefore burnout and staff turnover in services that are already understaffed today.

Alternative solution:

• It would be advisable to replace the 2027 date with a readiness condition: the ban on establishing FTCHs takes effect only after defined indicators have been achieved — the number of trained foster families, equipped housing, and staffing levels of support services — with a mandatory annual public government report on progress. Otherwise the reform risks amounting to the abolition of an existing form without a replacement emerging.
• The six-month limit should be tied to an indicator of community capacity: if there is not a single available foster family in the territory, then instead of an automatic breach of the deadline, a mechanism of inter-municipal cooperation should be triggered, with the mandatory preservation of the child’s school, doctor, and social ties.
• Raising the age for foreign adoption requires a monitoring provision: an annual public report on the number of children aged 5–10 adopted in Ukraine after the law enters into force, with the possibility of revising the provision if the expected growth in national adoption does not occur.
• The 1996 Hague Convention — the Central Authority should be designated without delay, not a year after martial law ends. The protection of the rights of Ukrainian children abroad cannot wait.
• The new duties of children’s affairs services must be accompanied by resources. Round-the-clock response, expanded powers, and the professional development of staff require a corresponding headcount, payment for work outside normal hours, and transport, material, and technical provision. Without this, additional legislative requirements may increase the burden on the services without improving the actual protection of children.