Hague Conference on Private International Law

When a Mumbai court wants to serve a summons on a defendant in Rotterdam, or a family in Delhi wants a Dutch birth certificate accepted in India, or a couple adopts a child across borders, someone has to decide how the paperwork crosses the border. Every country could invent its own rules, and the result would be chaos. The Hague Conference on Private International Law exists to write shared rules. This topic explains what it is, how its conventions work, and which of them matter for family law.

In two minutes

The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) is an intergovernmental organisation, based in The Hague, that drafts multilateral conventions to harmonise private international law, and in family matters its key instruments cover adoption, child abduction, child protection, maintenance, and service and proof of documents, with India's link to them visible in the Juvenile Justice Act 2015.

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