The Rights of Vulnerable Groups | The AD & Another Case

Known as the Baby Ruth Case, this matter provoked profound emotion inside and outside Court. A baby a few weeks old had been found abandoned, and handed over to the family of an African-American pastor living and working in South Africa. After lengthy attempts to find adoptive parents in South Africa had failed, the pastor went to the High Court to get an order that it was in the best interests of the child to travel with the pastor's family to New York and then be formally adopted there. Advocates of children's rights in South Africa objected vigorously to the way in which the South African Children's Court had been bypassed. After vociferous disagreements by judges on the way up, the matter arrived at the Constitutional Court. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Sachs dealt with changing attitudes over the years to inter-country adoption, and particularly to the concern that people in the South had over the way affluent families in the more wealthy parts of the world would seek to find children for adoption in poorer lands. The solution in South Africa was to ensure that the local Children's Court balanced out all the different interests involved. Only in very exceptional cases, such as when a close family member of the child was seeking the adoption, could there be an application to the High Court. In this particular case, however, Baby Ruth had been with the adoptive family for so long that her interests clearly lay in her staying with them.