Mediterranean Fertility Institute Case (Chania, Crete, 2023):
Demand That the Trial Proceed on 14 October 2026 Without Postponement.
Addressed to: Greek Ministry of Justice, Hellenic Supreme Court (Areios Pagos), Prosecutor General of Chania, European Commission (DG Justice and Consumers), European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM), Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights
Date: September 2026
I. Background: A Documented Human Trafficking Operation
On August 10th 2023, Greek federal police raided the Mediterranean Fertility Institute (MFI) in Chania, Crete, arresting eight members of staff following an investigation by the Hellenic Police’s organised crime unit that had begun in December 2022. The clinic’s founder and clinical director, Ioannis Giakoumakis, was among those detained, along with the clinic’s embryologist and six other employees. The doctor-owner and the embryologist were held in pre-trial detention for two years. The charges established by the Hellenic Police are severe: human trafficking, violations of assisted reproduction legislation, purchase and sale of genetic material, falsification of medical data for the purpose of selling genetic material, forgery, false medical certificates, fictitious marriages, illegal adoption, and fraud.
The investigation documented the following facts:
98 women were trafficked as surrogate mothers; 71 additional women were exploited as egg donors. The women, primarily from low-income Eastern European countries, were housed in 14 residences procured and controlled by MFI. MFI employees received bounties of approximately €2,800 to €4,700 for each woman recruited. Surrogate mothers received between €290 and €570 per month during pregnancy. Commissioning clients were charged between €67,000 and €115,000 per surrogate birth. The investigation further revealed sham embryo transfers, falsified legal documents, and fictitious marriages arranged to meet Greek judicial requirements. The chair of the National Authority for Medically Assisted Reproduction (NAMAR), Professor Nikolaos Vrachnis, was subsequently removed from his post by the Minister of Health and faces separate charges of breach of duty and bribery.
The scale of the operation, the documented use of housing to control women, the bounty system for recruiters, and the systematic falsification of consent documents constitute an industrial-scale trafficking structure. As described by prosecutors at the time, this was not an isolated case of regulatory non-compliance but an organised criminal network operating within, and exploiting, a legal surrogacy framework.
II. A Trial Date Is Set for 14 October 2026. It Must Not Be Postponed.
After two years of investigation, a trial date has been set. The fear, grounded in this country’s documented record, is that it will be postponed, and then postponed again, until the case dissolves.
The case is no longer at the investigation stage. Following a 1,600-page referral proposal by the head of the Chania Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Judicial Council committed the case to trial. Twenty-six defendants have been referred on seventeen charges, the first of which is the formation of and participation in a criminal organisation, with human trafficking, committed repeatedly and by profession, among the counts. The trial is scheduled to open on October 14th 2026 before the Three-Member Court of Appeal for Felonies of Crete. This is the procedural posture as reported by the Greek press in June 2026.
The setting of a date is necessary, but it does not by itself secure justice. For a case of this scale, a date that is set and then repeatedly adjourned would deliver the same outcome as no trial at all, while creating the appearance of progress. Greek feminist organisations following this case fear precisely this: that the October 14th 2026 hearing will be postponed on routine grounds, and that successive adjournments will stretch the proceedings until witnesses are unreachable, evidence has aged, and the prosecution collapses under its own delay. That fear is not speculative, it rests on a documented pattern in the handling of trafficking cases in Greece.
The risk of serial postponement has concrete consequences for the women who were trafficked. The victims are migrants, many of whom have returned to their countries of origin. Each adjournment lengthens the interval during which their ability to participate in proceedings diminishes: witnesses disperse, contact details lapse, the evidentiary record ages, and institutional memory of the case erodes. Meanwhile, the two defendants released after two years of pre-trial detention have returned to private life. This is not a symmetrical burden of waiting. It is an asymmetry that operates structurally in favour of the accused and against the victims, and every postponement deepens it. In trafficking cases, delay is not a neutral cost borne equally; it is a resource that works for the defence.
Repeated postponement also engages Greece’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 6 §1 guarantees the right to a hearing within a reasonable time, a guarantee that is breached not only by the absence of a trial but by proceedings drawn out through successive adjournments. Greece is among the States most frequently condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for excessive length of criminal proceedings, to the point that the systemic nature of the problem was recognised in the pilot judgment Michelioudakis v. Greece. A October 14th 2026 date that dissolves into a sequence of adjournments would place the MFI case squarely within that documented pattern of conventional violation.
According to the United States Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report, which has documented the same findings consistently through its 2025 edition, court proceedings in Greece often last between two and six years, during which the State does not consistently preserve the testimony of foreign victims who have returned to their countries of origin. The Department records that this produces lenient sentences, cases tried under offences carrying lesser penalties, and acquittals of suspected traffickers for lack of evidence. The same source documents that some suspected traffickers have intentionally postponed their court appearances to increase the chances that victims would be unable to testify, have threatened victims and their family members, and may have paid repatriated victims to preclude them from testifying. The MFI case carries every one of these risk factors at once: foreign victims now dispersed across their countries of origin, an extended pre-trial interval, and defendants released from custody. Nearly three years have already elapsed since the arrests, and although a date has now been set for 14 October 2026, the trial has not yet been held. The demand that the trial proceed on that date without postponement is therefore not a rhetorical preference; it is a measure to prevent an outcome that Greece’s own documented record makes predictable
A trial postponed without end is not justice delayed. It is an acquittal handed down one adjournment at a time. We will not accept another delay.
The Greek surrogacy industry has not been suspended in the interim.Law 5197/2025 introduced new residency requirements for commissioning clients and surrogate mothers, but left the legal framework for surrogacy intact. No moratorium on surrogacy arrangements has been imposed pending the outcome of the MFI case. The framework that produced the largest documented surrogacy trafficking operation in Greek history continues to operate while that operation awaits a trial that has no date. Undoubtedly this was a modification of the law aiming to prevent the trafficking of women in the name of reproductive rights and we are waiting to see the impact that it will generate concerning this fundamental issue in the surrogacy continuation in Greece. No data are available for us until today.
The absence of a trial date is also indefensible in the context of European Union law. The EU Anti-Trafficking Directive 2024/1712, which entered into force on July 14th 2024 and must be transposed by EU Member States by July 15th 2026, explicitly classifies the exploitation of surrogacy as a form of human trafficking where coercion or deception is involved. Greece is bound by this Directive. The failure to bring the MFI defendants promptly to trial signals that trafficking in the context of reproductive medicine does not attract the prosecutorial urgency applied to other forms of trafficking.
III. Why This Case Demonstrates the Structural Failure of Surrogacy Regulation
The MFI case is not an anomaly produced by insufficient regulation. It is a direct product of the Greek regulatory framework. Greece legalised surrogacy in 2002 (Law 3089/2002) and opened it to international commissioning clients in 2014. MFI was the largest provider of surrogacy in Greece, operating openly for over thirty years and holding judicial authorisations for hundreds of arrangements. The NAMAR was the designated supervisory body. The regulatory infrastructure was in place. The trafficking nonetheless occurred at industrial scale, under the supervision of the regulatory authority whose own president is now facing criminal charges.
This pattern is consistent with the empirical record across every jurisdiction that has attempted to regulate surrogacy: the legal framework does not eliminate exploitation, it provides the infrastructure through which exploitation is organised and concealed. The sequence of regulatory failures, India, Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kenya, Mexico, Colombia, and now Greece, demonstrates that each regulatory model generates the conditions for the abuses it claims to prevent. Legality confers legitimacy on the transaction, while the market pressure to reduce surrogate compensation and increase client charges creates structural incentives for trafficking.
The MFI case is not an argument for better regulation. It is evidence that regulation, as such, cannot resolve the contradiction at the heart of surrogacy: the use of a woman’s body as a gestational instrument for a third party is incompatible with the non-commodification of the human body and with the prohibition on trafficking in persons, regardless of the contractual form it takes.
IV. Demands
To the Greek Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor General of Chania, and the Three-Member Court of Appeal for Felonies of Crete.
We demand that the trial proceed on its scheduled date of October 14th 2026 and that it not be postponed save for a compelling cause, documented in writing and made public. We will not accept another delay. Routine adjournment of a case of this gravity, involving 98 trafficked women and 71 exploited egg donors, would itself violate the rights of the victims and engage Greece’s obligations under Article 6 §1 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Should the October 14th 2026 hearing be postponed without a compelling and publicly documented justification, the signatories will refer the procedural conduct of this case to the European Commission and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights as evidence of Greece’s failure to discharge its obligations. We further call for the establishment of a victim support mechanism that enables the trafficked women to participate in proceedings irrespective of their current country of residence, consistent with Greece’s obligations under Article 12 of the EU Anti-Trafficking Directive 2024/1712, including provision for remote testimony and for the funding of victims’ travel and representation or even a provisory permission of stay in the country according to the Greek and European regulations against human trafficking
To the European Commission and the European Parliament FEMM Committee
We call on the European Commission to monitor the conduct of the MFI trial, in the context of its oversight of the transposition of Directive 2024/1712, as a test of Greece’s effective implementation of its obligations under the Directive and treat any pattern of unjustified adjournment as a matter of compliance.. We call on the FEMM Committee to hold a hearing on the use of surrogacy regulatory frameworks as vectors for human trafficking, with specific reference to the MFI case.
To the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights
We call on the Commissioner to formally address the Greek government regarding the conduct in the MFI trial, the engagement of Article 6 §1 of the Convention, and the continued operation of a legal surrogacy framework that has demonstrably failed to prevent industrial-scale trafficking of women.
V. Signatories
This position paper is co-signed by:
1. To Mov – Feminist Movement, Greece. Greece’s leading radical feminist organisation.
2. European Network of Women.
3. FEMINA – Feminist Network of Dialogue and Action.
4.CIAMS – International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood. Coalition of 60 organisations across 20 countries (Australia, South Korea, Japan, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Greece, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Colombia, Nigeria, Canada, United States).
Legal and Institutional References
Directive (EU) 2024/1712 of the European Parliament and of the Council of May 13th 2024 on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings and protecting its victims (OJ L, 2024/1712, 24.5.2024).
European Convention on Human Rights, Article 6 §1 (right to a hearing within a reasonable time); Michelioudakis v. Greece (pilot judgment on excessive length of criminal proceedings).
United States Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, Greece chapters, 2025.
Hellenic Police, official statement on the arrest of MFI staff, Chania, August 10th 2023.
UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, Report A/80/158, October 2025 (Reem Alsalem).
Greek Law 3089/2002 on medically assisted human reproduction; Law 3305/2005; Law 4272/2014; Law 5197/2025 (Article 46).
Palermo Protocol (UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, Annex II, 2000), Articles 3 and 9.
CEDAW General Recommendation No. 38 (2020) on trafficking in women and girls in the context of global migration; CEDAW/CRC Joint General Recommendation/General Comment No. 31/18 (2019).