The Health Service Executive said yesterday it would not be commenting on a High Court judgment which resulted in a two-year-old boy being returned to his alcoholic parents.
The child was in foster care and his foster parents had hoped to adopt him.
It was reported yesterday that Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne had made the ruling in this case but her judgment has not yet been published.
A spokeswoman for the HSE said it would not be commenting on the ruling in case it would be appealed.
The Irish Independent reported that the baby was born in the North in January 2005, after its mother moved there from the Republic to give birth to avoid having the child taken into care. The HSE had threatened to take the child into care once it was born. Her husband was in prison at the time and their six other children had been taken into care in the Republic.
But within weeks of its birth the baby was placed in care by health authorities in the North, which decided the baby's stability and security would best be achieved through adoption.
The child's parents objected to the adoption and during an access visit in February 2006, his birth mother is reported to have abducted him and taken him back to the Republic.
The abduction of the child, known as Baby S, then became the subject of the High Court proceedings under the Hague Convention, which governs international child abductions.
While the court found the baby had been illegally removed from the North, it decided that because of the protection afforded to the family under the Constitution, it could not sanction the baby's return to the Northern Ireland health authorities.
The court acknowledged that the child had had limited links with its natural parents and that its removal back to the Republic would be traumatic for him.