In June we are meeting with the Lumos Foundation (as part of the Global Alliance for Children’s mirror plan for the Action Plan) to discuss Lumos’ new office and presence in Washington. CAPP and Lumos will be working together specifically to advance the Action Plan in Congress and the Obama administration.

http://www.jointcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/CEO-Report-to-Board-May-2014.pdf

Synopsis

Jacobs would meet with government officials to discuss further cooperation as partners under The Hague Adoption Convention.

WASHINGTON: America's Special Advisor for Children's issues Susan Jacobs will travel to India this week to hold talks with Indian officials on cooperation as partners under Hague Adoption Convention.

During her visit to India from May 11 to 14, Jacobs would meet with "government officials to discuss further cooperation as partners under The Hague Adoption Convention," the State Department said in a statement yesterday. "She will also continue our regular discussions on international parental child abduction," it added.

 

Former Ambassador Susan Jacobs spent much of her career in diplomacy focused on international children's issues, including a position as the United States’ first Special Advisor for International Children's Issues, helping to uphold The Hague Conventions on adoptions and abductions. In this episode, Jacobs joins Annelise Riles to talk about her career in the foreign service, as one of the first married women to become a foreign service officer, and her work as it relates to United Nations Sustainable Development goal number 16, which includes targets related to protecting children.

We need to be working with countries so that children aren't pushed to the borders, that they have opportunities in their own countries that will enable them to have full, productive lives. And I think that our aid programs should be geared more towards helping children be protected and protecting their security so that they don't have to come to the border.”

– Susan Jacobs, Former Special Advisor for Children’s Issues, Department of State

Background reading:

Forging Ahead with International Adoption

Posted by Jonathan Amgott on December 01, 2011 at 05:26 PM EDT

On Monday, November 28, The White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships held an event to observe and celebrate National Adoption Month. This event featured senior Administration officials, Members of Congress and outside experts. You can read more about the event here. Also, you can view the President’s National Adoption Month proclamation here.

Supporting international adoption was the theme of our first panel during Monday’s National Adoption Month event at the White House. International adoption has touched the lives of thousands of American families. In 2010 alone, the adoptions of over 9,300 children from more than 100 countries were finalized. Appropriately, this panel was rooted in the understanding that while there were big issues to discuss, at the end of the day international adoption is deeply personal and profound for many Americans, including those who served as panelists.

Kathleen Strottman, Executive Director of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, was the first expert to speak. Kathleen discussed an exciting initiative called The Way Forward Project, a yearlong convening of government officials and civil society experts to study adoption in six African countries. Supported by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the CCAI initiative produced several adoption lessons applicable to other countries as well. Among these, child welfare systems should evaluate the full range of adoptive family options, including kinship and international adoption. Kathleen also suggested that efforts should be made to cultivate societal responsibility for all children, gather data on the number of children in foster care, and broaden children’s legal eligibility for adoption.

FREDDY LEONARD REPRESENTERA LA COMMUNAUTE EN ROUMANIE

Article réservé aux abonnés

Image auteur par défaut

Par Sabine Collin

Publié le 6/01/1993 à 00:00 Temps de lecture: 2 min

In five years, Michel Joseph, 32, has brought together about twenty Haitian families divided by adoption, a phenomenon that, in Haiti, owes its existence in most cases to the poverty that is at its height in the country. In this interview, he talks to us about the dismay of children and families, their cries of despair and the heavy emotions that run through him and the families, following his life-saving interventions.

There are legions of adopted or abandoned children who become adults, without ever knowing their real parents. They languish waiting for the day to meet them and often knock on every door to find help from people who can help them trace their origins, meet their biological parents. But often, without success. Some die without their eyes meeting.

Cries of despair, sadness, pain, regret: these are among other characteristics of the malaise of parents and children who are found in the context of adoption. Often approached by children who are light years away from their biological parents, the journalist and information director of Radio Télévision Caraïbes, Michel Joseph, answers our questions.

Loop Haiti: You have several distinctions to your credit, including the "Philippe Chaffanjon" prize, which you won in the 3rd edition with your report entitled "Adoption- Cry of Despair". Why did you choose this subject and not another?

Michel Joseph: It all started when one day a friend said to me: "Michel, there is a young man who lives in France and who would like to reconnect with his biological parents in Haiti. Do you think you could do something?" I said yes. I worked with the girl, in 24 hours she was able to reconnect with her origins in Haiti. I remember her name well: it was Katia Marie.

And there was the 3rd edition of the Philippe Chaffanjon multimedia reporting prize. I thought it was a good topic. Nobody was talking about it, but the problem was real.

Cry of despair why? Because there are so many children abroad who are looking for their biological parents in Haiti, so many parents also who are looking for traces of their children after 10 to 30 years of adoption. I proposed the subject to the competition, it caught the attention of the jury and I won the prize.

But what struck me most at the awards ceremony was the presence of an adopted girl living in France who had already found her biological parents in Haiti thanks to my reporting. I helped the girl, and when I won the award she was living proof of my work. That was in 2016. I had helped this girl and two other brothers find their biological parents.

SALINA, Kan. (KAKE) - New details have emerged from the biological mother of the child finally identified after being dug up in a backyard in Rose Hill. 

"It's kinda like hearing about it for the first time again today considering they finally figured it out,” said Christa Helm, biological mother. 

Helm says she is tired, she says it's been a long day, as DNA evidence confirms the body found buried in the backyard of a Rose Hill home is her biological daughter she named Natalie Marie Garcia. Police identified the remains as 6-year-old Kennedy Jean Schroer. 

"She was a really sweet girl,” said Helm. 

She says she lost custody of her three children in 2018. The girls' foster family, Joe and Crystina Schroer from Rose Hill adopted them in 2019. Helm says that, at the time, she disagreed with how the state handled the case. 

SALINA, Kan. (KAKE) - New details have emerged from the biological mother of the child finally identified after being dug up in a backyard in Rose Hill. 

"It's kinda like hearing about it for the first time again today considering they finally figured it out,” said Christa Helm, biological mother. 

Helm says she is tired, she says it's been a long day, as DNA evidence confirms the body found buried in the backyard of a Rose Hill home is her biological daughter she named Natalie Marie Garcia. Police identified the remains as 6-year-old Kennedy Jean Schroer. 

"She was a really sweet girl,” said Helm. 

She says she lost custody of her three children in 2018. The girls' foster family, Joe and Crystina Schroer from Rose Hill adopted them in 2019. Helm says that, at the time, she disagreed with how the state handled the case. 

Romania and the United States, through the head of the prime minister’s chancellery Alexandru-Mihai Ghigiu, and the US ambassador to Romania, Kathleen Kavalec, have signed a five-year Child Protection Framework Partnership valued at USD 10 million.

The purpose of the partnership is to create a victim-centered prevention strategy and protect child victims of trafficking, according to the US ambassador.

“Many adult human trafficking victims around the world, including in the United States, were first exploited as children,” Kathleen Kavalec said.

Kavalec also stated that the US State Department will contribute up to USD 10 million over a five-year period to implement activities in Romania under the CPC partnership. She also mentioned that several NGOs will contribute to the implementation of this partnership.

Also present at the signing, Romanian interior minister Cătălin Predoiu noted that globally, abuse phenomena, including online, against children have increased alarmingly.

Chilean adoptee Mirjam Hunze is starting a lawsuit in Chile for child abduction to the Netherlands. She is holding the Chilean state liable for illegal adoptions by 'nun' Truus Kuijpers. She is also demanding that the Netherlands provide access to adoption documents and question those involved, including Kuijpers' sister and former employees of the Las Palmas orphanage.

Human rights lawyers from the Chilean Colombara office filed the case on Mirjam's behalf with the Santiago Court of Appeal. The court has accepted her complaint of child abduction. Later, other Chilean adoptees will also start proceedings.

During the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, some 20,000 Chilean children were systematically adopted illegally abroad. This was done with the cooperation of doctors, notaries, judges, hospitals, orphanages and churches. "Thousands of people were harmed because their sons and daughters were taken and deprived of their right to identity, through deception and probably through a form of fraud from which many people benefited financially," says Jennifer Alfaro, coordinator of Colombara.

Truus Kuijpers ran the Las Palmas orphanage in Santiago since the 1970s. She presented herself as a 'nun', while she was not. She managed to have at least 155 children adopted from Chile, most of them in the Netherlands. Adoptees and their biological mothers accuse Kuijpers of having taken babies from hospitals without permission and offered them for adoption. Kuijpers was a suspect in a criminal investigation in Chile, but she died in January 2023.