New podcast series from DR Dokumentar reveals that Danish adoption agency was involved in bribery and child trafficking in the 1980s.

In March 1983, the Danish adoption agency AC Børnehjælp received a typewritten letter from one of the agency's employees in Lebanon. It was a Danish woman whose job was to help the agency find children for adoption.

The letter stated that she had been put in touch with a Lebanese midwife who could provide children.

- Apparently she can give us the children we want, but the price is 21-25,000 DKK (the currency of the time, ed.). Nobody gets anything for free in Lebanon. Take it or leave it (...) I'm standing in line with people who are willing to pay any amount for the child.

The story of how Anna came to Denmark

Iresha and Inoka Knops, two sisters who were adopted from Sri Lanka in 1985 by Ine and Ed Knops, are committed to the future of their birth village. The ladies grew up in the Netherlands, but discovered by chance last year that their biological mother, a sister, four half-brothers and a half-sister are still alive. What started as an emotional reunion, resulted in a mission to help the community in their birth village.
 

The discovery of their biological mother came unexpectedly during a holiday of Iresha. "It was very special, emotional and very beautiful," the sisters say. Although they never planned to visit their biological family, the meeting brought peace. "It is nice to know that our adoption went well and that our biological mother supported it."

From support to action

During their visit, Iresha and Inoka were confronted with the poverty in their home village. Although they support their biological mother financially, they wanted to do more for their family and the rest of the community. “We didn’t just want to give money, but to ensure that people can develop and build a better future,” Iresha explains. The idea arose to set up a community college, with which they want to invest in education and development together with the Dutch Sampath Foundation.

A warm childhood in Sevenum

ROMFILATELIA SUPPORTS SERA ROMANIA FOUNDATION THROUGH A POSTAL STATIONERY FOR A NOBLE CAUSE – “EVERY CHILD DESERVES A FAMILY!”

On Monday, October 24th, 2016, the Romanian Athenaeum hosted the anniversary event 20 years of activity SERA Romania Foundation, which marked two working decades of this nongovernmental institution, serving to protect the children in need.

The event included a series of moments which guaranteed an exceptional evening, based on a noble cause “Every child deserves a family”: the anniversary charity symphonic music concert, having the famous American pianist Alan Gampel as special guest, the photo exhibition dedicated to the work of the foundation, the philatelic moment of presenting the dedicated postal stationery and a cocktail which ended the evening successfully.

The host of the evening, Mr. Bogdan Simion, Executive Director of SERA Romania Foundation, had several special guests: Mr. Dragos Pislaru, Minister of Labour, Family and Social Protection for the Elderly, Ms. Arielle de Rothschild, President of the Board of Directors of the CARE France Foundation, Ms. Michele Ramniceanu, Board Member of the CARE France Foundation, members of the Chamber of Deputies, of the Diplomatic Corps, including H.E. Ms. Tamar Samash, the Israeli Ambassador to Bucharest. There were also representatives of the General Directorates for Social Assistance and Child Protection, guests from the business environment, as well as institutional partners of the foundation.

In order to support the activity of the Foundation, as well as celebrating its anniversary of 20 years of existence, Romfilatelia joined the festive moment by designing a postal stationery with a fixed stamp, wishing to be a loud voice for those causes that deserve to be heard.

Adoption from abroad is increasingly being questioned. The research program Zembla recently paid attention to corruption in adoptions from Sri Lanka, and on television in April was the Dutch documentary drama 'Exportbaby', about corruption in adoptions from Uganda. Last year, the Council for Criminal Justice Application and Youth Protection advised to ban adoption from abroad.

One of the first to uncover corruption scandals was Roelie Post, an official at the European Commission in Brussels. In the late nineties she worked for the EC on the issue of children's rights in Romania. They had to be resolved before Romania's accession to the EU was possible.

Post was faced with opposition and threats that are so serious that she is now living in hiding in a village in the north of the Netherlands and that she has a long-standing conflict with her employer, the EC. It does not recognize her as a whistleblower and threatens with punitive measures.

Roelie Post tells her story in Argos.

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When they closed the Romanian “baby shops”

“There have been moments when we took more into account the interests of the parents then those of the children”

“The Irene Foundation, the Romanian associate of the Spanish agency ADECOP, was the best in manoeuvering bribery”

“As the US managed to get exceptions to the moratorium on international adoptions in Romania, we wanted an equitable treatment”

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.Gala à Bruxelles

1. Gotha/

Vie mondaine

06 juin 2023

BruxellesGalaGothaMondanités

Hand-delivered to Legal Advisor Oliver Dreute on 12 February

and send by registered mail on 16 February.

Copied to:

- European Ombudsman

- European Presidency Mark Rutte

1. Dossiers
2. Didier Reynders

Didier Reynders soupçonné d'avoir blanchi jusqu'à 800.000 euros en dix ans

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