The Hamburg Regional Court has sentenced a 34-year-old Afghan migrant to two years’ probation for rape and several counts of aggravated assault against his former partner, an 18-year-old girl. German social media accounts have already sharply criticized the sentence, arguing it is another example of lenient sentencing in the face of serious crimes.
While the defendant initially admitted only to striking her with his hand, he ultimately confessed to the remaining charges. The court convicted him of four counts of assault, one count of aggravated assault, and one count of rape. As a condition of his probation, he must pay an additional €3,000 in compensation after paying another €2,000 in damages to the victim before the verdict.
Judge Malte Wellhausen detailed that the six offenses occurred between autumn 2016 and spring 2018. The trial faced substantial procedural delays, leading the court to count four months of the sentence of the Afghan man, who works in IT, as already served.
The court found the Afghan man physically assaulted his former girlfriend on five separate occasions, including an incident where he used a leather belt and another instance where he choked her to the point of respiratory distress. The rape took place in October 2016, approximately ten years ago.
The defendant first met the 18-year-old high school graduate from Lower Saxony through an online platform. Physical abuse began only months after their initial meeting, starting when he struck her face. When the young woman reacted with fear and tears, the defendant remarked, “That wasn’t even hard.”
Routine physical assaults followed over minor issues, as well as disputes stemming from the victim’s parents opposing her relationship with the Afghan-born defendant.
The sexual assault occurred in his bedroom while both were in bed, leaving the victim with physical pain and bleeding. Despite the nature of the assault, she did not initially identify the incident as rape. Over the following months, the physical abuse persisted, including the incident involving the leather belt while the woman reportedly blamed herself for the incidents, according to German newspaper Welt.
In August 2017, after overhearing her covertly speaking with a friend on the phone, the defendant struck her face, causing her nose to bleed, and choked her violently by the neck. Rather than reaching out for assistance, the victim suffered severe distress, blamed herself, and engaged in self-harm.
During a subsequent trip to the United States, the defendant proposed to her, and she accepted out of fear. She eventually managed to break away from the relationship in 2018 by relocating her life to Denmark.
The criminal investigation began after the woman noticed a missing person report that featured a photograph of a garden in the Poppenbüttel district of Hamburg, where she had previously resided with the defendant. Concerned for the safety of the woman shown in the report, she eventually spoke with police officers and detailed the abuse she had endured, prompting authorities to open a criminal case.
Judicial findings later confirmed that the disappearance of the other woman was entirely unrelated to the defendant. Authorities proceeded with the investigation despite the victim’s reluctance to participate from Denmark. Further delays arose due to pandemic border closures and the illness of an expert witness, pushing the formal filing of charges to 2024.
The victim in the case tried to avoid the trial altogether and only joined in for video testimony after facing potential prosecution. The court ultimately found her account credible due to its memory detail and complete lack of malicious intent toward the accused.
Defense lawyer Claudia Krüger was positive about the ruling, calling it “a judgment with a sense of proportion. I am very satisfied.“
While the defense had argued for a suspended sentence, prosecutors had requested a prison term of three years and two months. The defense won out but the sentence is subject to appeal.
BioTexCom, a Ukrainian firm, has announced a September conference in Warsaw promoting surrogacy and offering the “purchase” of a child for 65,000 euros; the case is now with prosecutors
Since 2023, Ordo Iuris has submitted opinions to UN and EU bodies arguing that surrogacy constitutes human trafficking and the sale of children under international law.
The Ordo Iuris Institute cooperates with UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, whose report on violence against mothers cited its position; Alsalem was a guest at a conference organized in June 2026.
Ordo Iuris advocates a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child banning surrogacy and has prepared Polish translations of two UN reports on the issue.
The Ordo Iuris Institute is petitioning Poland’s Minister of Justice, Waldemar Żurek, to block the event organized in Warsaw by BioTexCom as a promotion of human trafficking; the appeal is available at niedlasurogacji.pl.
On September 12–13, the Ukrainian company BioTexCom plans to hold a conference in Warsaw aimed at promoting programs offering surrogate motherhood and in vitro fertilization. The company is inviting interested parties to individual meetings with its representatives, offering surrogacy packages worth nearly 65,000 euros. Under Polish law—unlike Ukrainian law—surrogacy may be classified as a criminal offense. The matter of the Warsaw conference has already been referred to the prosecutor’s office.
This event is not an isolated episode but another manifestation of a broader phenomenon: Poland, alongside other Western and Central European countries that lack their own surrogacy regulations, has for years been becoming a market for foreign so-called reproductive companies. In this context, it is worth recalling that the issue of surrogacy has for years been a central concern of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law—both at the domestic level and in the most important international forums.
Opinions and positions at the UN and the European Union
Since 2023, the Institute has regularly submitted opinions and positions to bodies of the United Nations (UN) and institutions of the European Union (EU), consistently arguing that surrogacy meets the definition of human trafficking and the sale of children under international law. In February 2023, Ordo Iuris experts published an analysis showing that European Union law does not require member states to legalize surrogacy. When, in December 2024, the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on trafficking in women and girls that for the first time explicitly addressed the phenomenon of surrogacy, the Ordo Iuris Institute described it as a significant precedent.
A special place in these efforts is occupied by the cooperation with Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who consistently defends the biological understanding of sex and motherhood in her reports. Ordo Iuris took part in informal expert consultations conducted by Alsalem for both of her key documents—the report on violence against women in the context of surrogacy, submitted to the UN General Assembly in October 2025, and the report on violence against mothers, presented to the Human Rights Council in July 2026. Importantly, the Ordo Iuris Institute’s position was explicitly cited in the latter document, in the section addressing the devaluation of motherhood in contemporary public and institutional discourse.
This cooperation also took a direct form: on June 3, 2026, Reem Alsalem personally took part—as a special guest—in the international academic conference “Motherhood in the 21st Century” organized by Ordo Iuris at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University. During the panel devoted to surrogacy, she presented the findings of her report, outlining the profile of women who become surrogates—almost exclusively poor women, often single mothers or immigrants—and calling for a model of surrogacy abolition modeled on the abolition of prostitution. She was accompanied by Olivia Maurel, spokeswoman for the international Casablanca Declaration—a coalition of more than 150 experts from 75 countries advocating a universal ban on surrogacy—who was herself born through the procedure and shared a moving personal testimony.
Cooperation with the initiators of the Casablanca Declaration
This is not the first time the paths of Ordo Iuris and the circle surrounding the Casablanca Declaration have crossed. As early as April 2024, the Ordo Iuris Institute took part in an international conference in Rome organized by the Declaration’s initiators, devoted entirely to the issue of surrogacy, and addressed its findings in the commentary “The Right to a Child, or the Rights of the Child?” The participation of the Declaration’s spokeswoman in the Warsaw conference in June 2026 is thus a continuation of many years of ongoing cooperation with this coalition, not an isolated episode.
A call for a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child
In its opinions submitted to the UN, the Ordo Iuris Institute consistently puts forward a specific legislative proposal: the adoption of a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that would explicitly prohibit surrogacy. The legal argumentation, developed in particular in the November opinion for the Special Rapporteur, invokes Article 35 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 2(a) of the existing 2000 Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, whose definition of “the sale of children”—in the assessment of Ordo Iuris experts—also covers surrogacy agreements under which a child is transferred in exchange for remuneration or another benefit.
Polish translations of UN reports
The latest element of this activity is a publication that took place just a few days ago. On August 25, 2026, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published on its official website Polish translations of both of Reem Alsalem’s reports mentioned above—on violence against women in the context of surrogacy and on violence against mothers. Both translations were prepared by the Ordo Iuris Institute. Thanks to this, Polish-speaking lawyers, journalists, public administration officials, and NGOs have gained direct access to the full content of both documents—without relying on the fragmentary quotations and secondary media coverage through which UN reports had until now been known in Polish public discourse.
The actions outlined above—more than a dozen opinions and positions submitted to the UN and the EU, participation in the UN Special Rapporteur’s expert consultations, its own international academic conference in Warsaw, cooperation with the initiators of the Casablanca Declaration, the call for a new international treaty, and the preparation of official translations of UN reports—together form a picture of Ordo Iuris’s systematic, years-long engagement in the fight against surrogacy at both the domestic and international levels. It is against this backdrop that the Ordo Iuris Institute’s opposition to the BioTexCom conference planned for September 12–13 in Warsaw should be understood. The Ordo Iuris Institute has prepared a petition to Poland’s Minister of Justice, Waldemar Żurek, calling for the event to be blocked.
“The conference that the Ukrainian company is planning for September in Warsaw is not a neutral informational event, but a promotional campaign for a commercial reproductive business that treats a woman’s body as a means of production and a child as a product tailored to the client’s expectations.
Polish law does not explicitly criminalize surrogacy, but that does not mean a legal vacuum. An agreement under which a child is handed over in exchange for payment may meet the definition of human trafficking, and organizing and promoting such practices on the territory of the Republic of Poland should meet with a response from the relevant authorities. Ordo Iuris has for years documented the mechanisms of exploitation built into commercial surrogacy: from Colombia, through Ukraine, to the United States—and consistently works to ensure that this problem is no longer treated as the private affair of ‘commissioning parents,’ but is recognized for what it truly is: a form of economic exploitation of women in difficult life circumstances and a violation of a child’s fundamental right to identity and to a bond with the mother who gave birth to them,” notes Julia Książek of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law.
A 23-year-old Guinean national already under an order to leave France (QQTF) is in pre-trial detention after being accused of raping a 17-year-old girl in foster care in Évreux on the evening of July 26. The details of this case are only now being reported, a month later.
The teenager, who lives in a foster home and was receiving psychological care, encountered the man near the city’s cathedral. Prosecutors say he forced her into his car, issued threats, paused at a kebab shop to eat, and then took her to his apartment close to the cathedral. Once inside, he is alleged to have slapped her, pushed her onto the bed and raped her as she cried out, according to French newspaper Paris-Normandie.
A roommate heard the screams. Afraid of confronting the resident himself, he called the police. Officers arrived to find the suspect insisting that “everything is fine.” From the rear of the apartment, they could still hear the girl sobbing. They entered immediately.
A subsequent medical examination recorded ten days of temporary incapacity for the victim. The suspect, who holds a permanent bodywork job in the Paris region and has no previous convictions, denied any rape allegations. He told investigators the girl had consented. Prosecutors rejected his request for release, pointing to the victim’s vulnerability, the risk that he might pressure her, and his irregular immigration status. A deportation order against him had already been issued but never carried out.
German police have released a photograph of a violent suspect, Emre Battal, whom police believe may be armed. Battal allegedly shot two people on Saturday afternoon in the city of Worms and remains on the run.
Police report the man became involved in an altercation with another man and a woman at around 4:30 p.m., with the argument turning violent. Battal drew his firearm and shot both the man and the woman. They both suffered serious gunshot wounds but are not in critical condition.
Battall quickly fled the scene, and despite an intense police manhunt, he successfully evaded capture. As a result, a photograph of the 31-year-old suspect has now been released. During the shooting, he was wearing a black T-shirt, black shoes, dark shorts, and a black baseball cap. He also has a distinctive lion tattoo.
German police warn the public not to approach the man, as he may still be armed.
The Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine (SZBU) struck a Tu-95MS strategic bomber in Engels, Russia, announced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Facebook on Friday.
Ukraine’s leader also confirmed that Ukrainian units attacked an oil refinery in Russia’s Yaroslavl region and several targets in the Black Sea.
“In the last 24 hours, Ukraine’s defense forces struck an oil refinery in the Yaroslavl region. The distance is a thousand kilometers from the front line. In the Black Sea, too, we have given our own just answers to the Russian war. In Engels, Russia, soldiers of the SZBU Alpha unit struck a Tu-95MS strategic bomber aircraft. It is precisely with such aircraft that strikes are carried out against Ukraine,” wrote Zelensky in his post.
Pro-Ukrainian accounts on X celebrated the destruction of the plane.
Ukrainian Forces has taken out another of Russia's long-range strategic bombers, after overnight strikes on the Engels-2 airbase, 700km distance from Ukraine.
Mostly being constructed back in the 1960's-1970's, Russia's rapidly vanishing bomber fleet had only recently lost… pic.twitter.com/YD3e5QPgXC
Operation Spiderweb in June 2025 is widely considered Ukraine’s most ambitious strike on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. After 18 months of planning, the SBU smuggled 117 FPV drones into Russia inside wooden cabins mounted on trucks. The trucks were parked near several airbases. The roofs of the vehicles were remotely opened and the drones were guided to their targets, which included Olenya , Belaya , Dyagilevo, and Ivanovo.
Ukraine claimed 41 aircraft were hit, including Tu-95s, Tu-22M3s, at least one Tu-160, and A-50 airborne early-warning planes, representing about 34 percent of Russia’s strategic cruise-missile carriers and causing roughly $7 billion in damage.
Independent satellite analysis and NATO assessments confirmed 10–13 aircraft destroyed and around 20–40 damaged. Visual evidence showed burning Tu-95s and Tu-22M3s on the tarmac.
The latest attack reveals that these Russian bombers still remain high-profile targets for Ukraine. Russia still appears unable to fully shield its fleet from drone and missile strikes despite moving many of these planes farther east in the country.
The Tu-95 itself is a four-engine turboprop design first produced by the Soviet Union in the 1950s. It is still used because no modern replacement is in series production.
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A TU-95MS strategic bomber was hit at Engels-2 airfield tonight. 
(@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) 
