Judge hands down ruling on true provenance and parentage of 11-month-old girl brought into UK from Nigeria

The Family Court has ruled that a couple are not the parents of a baby who arrived in the UK from Nigeria and that the woman concerned cannot - as she claimed - have been pregnant for 55 weeks.

Recorder Tyler KC, sitting as a deputy High Court judg, said the couple, identified as PM and PF, must respond to his findings and make proposals, while the local authority must set out formally any further assessment it proposes and make any further applications.

Judge Tyler said he would refer to the girl as Eleanor. She was reportedly born in Nigeria in June 2024 and the court sought to discover her true provenance and parentage.

“Was she, as [PM and PF} claim, conceived through assisted reproductive techniques (the implantation of a donor embryo – IVF) but carried to term and naturally delivered, in Nigeria, by [PM the purported mother] or was she, as the local authority which brings the case and the children's guardian contend, a baby bought in and knowingly trafficked from Nigeria to the UK by the first and second respondents?”

The purported mother (PM) travelled alone to Nigeria in 2024 and returned with Eleanor, for whom she had the requisite UK entry clearance and a Nigerian birth certificate recording her as Eleanor's mother and the purported father (PF) as her father.

PM was arrested on landing at Gatwick and Eleanor was removed to local authority foster care, where she remains.

PM and PF said the use of IVF explained the absence on DNA testing of any genetic nexus between Eleanor and them. PM said the implanted embryo became a viable foetus, which she carried for some 55 weeks and six days.

Judge Tyler said the issues for him were: is Eleanor the biological child of PM and PF; was PM ever pregnant with Eleanor; did PM give birth to Eleanor; what was and is the state of mind of PM and PF, in relation to Eleanor's true parentage?

He said the first three questions all had the answer ‘no’, which meant he had to determine whether there had been a preplanned and sustained deception on the part of one or both of the purported parents, up to and including presenting a knowingly false case to the court on oath?

Alternatively, had one or both genuinely believed themselves to be the genetic and/or gestational parents of Eleanor, or did the truth somewhere between these two extremes?

The family also has two boys and was not known to social services department until June 2024, when it received a referral from the local teaching hospitals safeguarding team as a result of PM's “sustained insistence that she had been pregnant despite all medical evidence to the contrary and her later having told the hospital that she had indeed given birth to a baby”.

Expert evidence suggested that a pregnancy of the length claimed by PM was unknown to medical science.

Judge Tyler said: “Eleanor’s DNA has twice been tested against that of the purported parents, different samples having been used on each occasion. The results are unequivocally inconsistent with there being any biological connection between Eleanor and PM and PF.”

He added that PM was never pregnant with Eleanor and did not give birth to her.

Turning to the parents’ states of mind, the recorder said: “I confess that the exercise of sifting through and analysing the evidence relevant to the determination of this question has been a more perplexing process.”

He said PM’s lawyer argued that an innocent explanation was possible given her a belief in traditional African healing and spirituality, the loss of an earlier child in infancy, and PM's other good qualities.

“A number of other aspects of the evidence, however, coalesce to suggest a different conclusion,” the judge said.

“First, there are the various things said and presented by the purported parents, PM in particular, which [the local authority] assert must be deliberate lies or deceptions.”

These included the late assertion of IVF. PM told the police that Eleanor was naturally conceived by her and PF, and there was no reason why DNA would not establish their biological parentage of her.

Only on receipt of negative DNA testing was it asserted that Eleanor had been conceived via IVF and a donor.

There was also a video provided by PM but Judge Tyler wondered why this showed events before and after birth but not the birth itself.

“That, after all, would have been conclusive evidence that the person in the video had, in fact, given birth,” he said.

“The answer, clearly, is that the person, i.e. PM, did not give birth to Eleanor. That much, however, is already known: as set out above, PM was incontrovertibly (i.e. on the overwhelming other evidence which establishes this) not pregnant with Eleanor.”

Judge Tyler later concluded that PM had "staged a scene that was video recorded and of which photographic images were taken, which she falsely claimed showed her giving birth to Eleanor, which it did not".

The judge found: “I am driven to conclude…that PM knew that she was not pregnant, knew that she was travelling to Nigeria in order effectively to buy another woman's baby, and knew, at the point of answering the police's questions, authoring her statements in these proceedings, and giving her oral evidence to me, that she was doing so inaccurately and dishonestly.”

He referred to PF’s good character but said: “Ultimately, I cannot accept that PF believed that his wife was in fact pregnant, certainly as the (non-)pregnancy progressed, nor that he was unaware that her trip to Nigeria was to procure a baby who was not theirs rather than naturally to give birth to one who was.”

The judge, “having made these starkly expressed findings in relation to both PM and PF”, added some further contextual observations.

“I have no doubt that the motivation of PM and PF in their quest to find Eleanor and to bring her into the country was no more or less than a genuine desire to add another baby to their family, and to offer her the love, devotion and security they have given to their two sons. It is also clear to me that PM's yearning to add to the family was largely driven by the huge, I imagine largely unresolved, grief she has endured subsequent to the death in infancy of her son, L.”

He added: “I entirely accept that they wanted nothing other than to give Eleanor the chance of a happy and fulfilled life with them, that they speak genuinely when they describe thinking of her as their 'princess'. Nor do I doubt, given the huge hole in her life which L's death impelled PM to try to fill, the enormous efforts to which she in particular went in order to procure Eleanor and to bring her to this country, and the fact that she cared for and tended to Eleanor for the first few weeks of her life, that she feels a real and agonising bond to and connection with Eleanor.”

However, he added that it was “equally clear… that, as above, both PM and PF know that Eleanor is not their child and was not carried by PM, and that significant and ongoing emotional and psychological harm awaits a child who is brought up in the context of the sort of fundamental lie which underpins PM and PF's account of her origins.”

Judge Tyler said the local authority had already taken steps to establish Eleanor's nationality and immigration status and those needed to be established to regularise her situation as she was stateless.

He said the case should return to him for directions as soon as possible.

Mark Smulian