 Wonderful. So what I'm going to give you a brief overview today is to kind of go backwards a bit because you've already heard about the proposed changes to the English law. Well I want to go back and tell you what the English law actually is at the moment and the difficulties that we have had leading to the need for the law commission to consider it for reform. So the regulation of surrogacy in England has largely emerged in a really kind of piecemeal fashion as a series of responses to individual cases coming before the courts. So in 1985 the United Kingdom was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to actually pass legislation on surrogacy when it responded to the publicity concerning a high-profile surrogacy by a woman called Kim Cotton. So Kim Cotton had been paid £6,500 to carry a surrogate child and a further £20,000 to sell her story to the tabloid press. And it was this resulting public outcry and this fear of a baby's-for-cash kind of industry which led to the government taking really swift legislative action. So at the time of this birth the government was still debating the recommendations of what was known as the Warnock Committee which in 1984 had taken a really antipathetic view of surrogacy. So this commission was established in 1982 by the government to look into the technologies of IVF and embryology which were just at that time emerging. And the committee recommended they said that any kind of attempt to legislate on surrogacy is only going to encourage people to use it. So instead what they did was they recommended that the legislation simply prohibit the recruitment of women for surrogacy and render criminal the operation of agencies for such purposes. So following the Cotton case the government ceased its deliberations and expeditiously passed what was known as the surrogacy arrangements Act 1985 in line with the Warnock Committee's recommendations. So there are two really important provisions in here which are still enforced to this day. Section 1A of the Act providing that the surrogacy arrangements are not enforceable either by or against the parties within them. Secondly it criminalizes anyone initiating, offering, agreeing or taking part in negotiations on a commercial basis with a view to making a surrogacy arrangement. And this is really important particularly for the lawyers because this means that you cannot help facilitate a surrogacy arrangement and charge for it. So these were the provisions that were passed in 1985 and it actually wasn't until five years later in 1990 that the government came back to look further at the implications of these advances in technologies and this was done under the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill which led to the 1990 Act of that name and this is the 2000 updated Act. So the 1990 Act originally didn't have any kind of status provisions for surrogacy in it. It didn't have any kind of way to recognize parenthood arising out of surrogacy or indeed to transfer parenthood from a surrogate to a legal, to a commissioning parent. And it wasn't until the very last stages of this bill going through Parliament that an MP actually raised this because he'd been lobbied by some of his constituents who were distressed at the fact that they were having to adopt what they saw as their own child because there was no other form of recognition and so what the government did was very quickly and hastily drafted to add what was known as and what is not as a parental order. Now this is the mechanism under English law by which we can transfer parenthood from the surrogate who is in all cases legal parent upon birth to the commissioning parents. So in order to do so section 54 of the 2008 Act which is the Act now enforced sets out a number of requirements. These are as I said ex-post fact done. This is why we describe England and Wales as a tolerant approach because it tolerates surrogacy. It doesn't regulate its use per se. It regulates the consequences of surrogacy for the law of parental order and these conditions are run through them quite quickly. You'll see on the website with the resources that I put a handout which has references to all the legislation or the government committee reports and also all the cases that I refer to in this presentation. So the first criteria that there's a genetic relationship between the commissioning parents and the child. Interestingly though there's no requirement for infertility to have use of surrogacy. The commissioning parents have to either be married civil partners or in an enduring family relationship so parental orders were restricted only to couples and it was only very recently that this was challenged before the courts and now has been opened up to single applicants also in Section 54A of the Act. The application must be made within six months of birth. The child must be living with the commissioning parents. The commissioning parents must be domiciled in the United Kingdom over 18 and then we get to the really important consent provisions. So the surrogate mother as Nick was saying this morning and any other man who was a woman recognised as a legal parent must give their consent to the making of the parental order. In England where there is no ability currently for the court to dispense with that consent and transfer legal parenthood without it. There is an exception if the parent cannot be found or is incapable of giving consent but obviously this is a more difficult burden hurdle to pass and I'll come back to that. The consent must be given more than six weeks after birth. This is in line with adoption legislation to give the mother time to physically, emotionally and psychologically recover from birth and then finally and perhaps most importantly for the English jurisprudence unless authorised by the court no money other than expenses reasonably incurred can be given in relation to the surrogacy arrangement handing over the child or consenting to the parental order. So this is our legislative framework. What I want to do for the rest of the talk is tell you how our judiciary has ripped it apart quite rightly as it were. So the first English case to deal with an overseas commercial surrogacy arrangement was known as re-X and Y foreign surrogacy in 2008. So in this case it was an English couple going to the Ukraine and they paid a Ukrainian surrogate approximately 235 euros per month as well as a lump sum of 25,000 euros for a live birth. Now as we can see there is no way that this could be conceptualised as reasonable expenses given the average wage in Ukraine. So the question before the court was would they nevertheless recognise the parenthood of this couple by making a parental order and in deciding whether to authorise these payments Mr Justice Headley set up three questions that the court should ask themselves. First was the sum paid disproportionate to reasonable expenses with the applicants acting in good faith and without moral taint in their dealings with the surrogate and were the applicants partied in any attempt to defraud the authorities. Now in answering these questions the court reminded itself that in deciding whether to authorise the payments and make this parental order the best interest of the child at that stage had to be a primary consideration. And Mr Justice Headley gave a really good speech which I'd like to read out in a bit more detail because I think it really sums up the difficulties faced by the courts in a situation where the child was inborn and the question is whether to recognise the reality of their situation. So he said I feel bound to observe that I found this process of authorisation most uncomfortable. What the court is required to do is to balance two competing and potentially irreconcilably conflicting concepts. Parliament is clearly entitled to legislate against commercial surrogacy and is clearly entitled to expect that the court should implement that policy consideration in its decisions. Yet it is also recognised that as the full rigour of that policy consideration will bear on one wholly unequipped to comprehend it, let alone deal with its consequences that is the child concerned. That rigour must be mitigated by the application of a consideration of the child's welfare. That approach is both humane and intellectually coherent. The difficulty is, he said, that it is almost impossible to imagine a set of circumstances in which by the time the case comes to court, the welfare of any child, particularly a foreign child, would not be gravely compromised at the very least by a refusal to make the order. And this in one paragraph sums up the problem with ex post facto regulation of surrogacy. And this has really set the tone for the cases that have followed. All of which acknowledge to a lesser or greater extent the near futility of this so-called balancing exercise, which judges are being asked to engage in. This approach has been actually strengthened by a change in the legislation in 2010, which promoted the child's welfare from being a primary consideration to the paramount consideration. What this means is that while the elevation of the child's welfare to paramount is in fact laudable, it's undermined the ability of the courts to refuse a parental order. So in effect, there is really no balance that can be achieved. And we've seen this in the cases that followed concerning reasonable expenses. We've seen sons of over 50,000 US dollars approved in California, routinely some 3,000 in India, 9,000 in Russia. And today, as far as I can tell from my survey of the case law, no case has been refused on the grounds of payments. Having said this, we can also see that in the text of the legislation, it does say no payments can be made unless authorized by the court. So the court does have some power there. On the other hand, if we look at the six month time limit, but the application must be made within six months. This is pretty clear statutory language. There's not really much room for interpretation or so you would think. Nevertheless, we have seen the courts have in fact extended this provision, this, this deadline. So James Mumby, who is in the room in a wonderful decision called reX, said that the court is not only entitled to extend this time limit, but is in fact bound to adopt a more liberal and relaxed approach to the interpretation of the time limit. Because this is the only human way to protect the rights of the child. So he said that a parental order doesn't just go to the status of the child, it goes to that their identity as a human being and its impact will extend far into the future. He said the court is not just concerned with the impact on the applicant whose default it is in meeting the time limit, but also the impact on the innocent child whose welfare must be the court's paramount concern. Now, at the time, it was emphasised that the decision was based on the particular facts and did not mean that we could just ignore the six month time limit whenever we wanted. Wise words, but unfortunately, this has been the case. And we've seen a case in which a 13 year old boy was the subject of a parental order. So we can see that despite the statutory language, the six month time limit has pretty much gone out the window. The second issue I want to draw your attention to is this issue of consent. As I said, this is one of the defining features of the English system, the surrogate must give her consent to the parental order. And where this is not forthcoming, then the courts, of course, have not made the order. Instead, they've dealt with the issue on by recognising the difference under English law between legal parenthood and who has care of the child. So instead of transferring the parenthood may simply recognise that legal parenthood lies with the surrogate mother. But the commissioning parents are responsible for the day to day care of the child. However, we have seen the courts willing to be more relaxed in their interpretation of the circumstances in which the parent cannot be found or is incapable of giving consent. And this once again, has been a matter of necessity. So there was an interesting case of redee a child where the court was faced with the question of the identity of the legal father. It was unclear whether the Georgian surrogate mother was married at the time of the child's birth. So it was unclear whether the legal father was her husband, or could in fact be the commissioning father who had given his genetic material. When the court tried to contact her at the address given by the surrogacy agency, although three women at that address claimed to be that person, or to answer to that name, none of them admitted giving birth to this child. And this raises the extreme difficulty that we have in dealing with international arrangements. And this is one of the reasons why it's so important the law commission is trying to bring people within the domestic system so that there can be some exercise of control. Because what we've seen again and again, that if commissioning parents go outside the system, go to an international destination and come back and present the courts with a fader complete, then the courts have no choice but to recognise a parent arising from that. Similarly, we saw a case called redee and L where the court tried to surrogate contact the surrogate mother because she had given her consent to the parental order before that six week time limit I mentioned. So the commissioning parents employed an inquiry agent to try and contact the mother that this was unsuccessful. The address that had been given was that of the agent rather than the mother. So they couldn't find her again. The court tried the surrogacy clinic when asked for its assistance, sent back a fax, a single piece of paper printed with in the words of the court and obscene gesture. And so as such, the court admitted that all the documents or the evidence submitted by the clinic have to be treated with caution. And so again, this shows the difficulty that the court is going to have in verifying the information, verifying the way that the surrogacy has been carried out in another jurisdiction. So what can we take from all this? This has been a rather whistle stopped tour through the English legislation. And I'm happy to answer further questions about the details at a later stage. But what we can see is the courts have played somewhat fast and loose with a statutory requirements for surrogacy. But we also have to accept that they have had little choice in the matter. When they're presented with a child who is living with the commissioning parents, who will be his or her parents for all intents and purposes, there is little if any scope for the courts to refuse an order. And as we were saying in the last session, there should be little or no scope for the courts to refuse an order because we are dealing with a child and we were dealing with the child's rights. The imperative to make the child's best interest, the paramount consideration, prevents the court from doing anything but making an order that reflects their current status. And this of course, has been emphasised also by the European Court of Human Rights in the seminal case of the menacing family. So what we can see is that English law has, at this point, reached an untenable position where the principles that we set out in the legislation have had to give way to the practicalities and the reality of the global surrogacy industry. All I can say is that until we reform our legislation, we're going to continue to have commissioning parents who will circumvent any and indeed all domestic law in their desire to become parents. This desire to form a family is stronger than the barriers currently put in place by the British legislation. And it is absolutely imperative that we do reform. Thank you.