Experts have negotiated access to thousands of records from institutions for unmarried mothers in Northern Ireland.

The documents are being assessed by the Truth Recovery Independent Panel, which is the first stage of an investigation set up by the devolved government.

After the Panel finishes its work, it plans to preserve the records in a permanent archive - aimed at providing relatives and survivors with the opportunity to research their past in a single location, with appropriate support.

More than 10,000 women and girls passed through around a dozen "mother-and-baby" institutions between the 1920s and the 1990s.

In Northern Ireland, there were also three Magdalene Laundries – in effect, workhouses where women and girls were made to carry out demanding duties.

[Interview] Swedish Adoptee Hanna Johansson's 15-Year Quest to Find Her Roots and the Reality of International Adoption

"There's not much time left."

Dr. Hanna Sofia Johansson (49), a Korean-Swedish adoptee and human rights activist, first visited Korea in 2007 and has since returned annually to her homeland 11 times over the past 15 years, searching for her roots. Found abandoned in Wangsimni, Seoul, she has spent decades searching for her birth mother and father. However, she has faced countless setbacks, including the concealment of adoption agency records, the disappearance of her old neighborhood due to rapid urban redevelopment, and the stalled administrative procedures.

Dr. Johansson's story goes beyond simply exploring her personal roots. It vividly exposes the structural problems and national responsibility that over 200,000 Korean adoptees have faced over the past 70 years. In 2022, the Sweden Korean Adoptees Network (SKAN), to which she belongs, filed a request with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate 21 cases of international adoption, confirming the widespread nature of systemic, illegal adoption practices, including manipulation of adoption records, forged signatures, and falsely recorded parental information.

Dr. Johansson firmly states, "Korea must no longer be a 'child exporter' in the world." He emphasizes the urgent need for post-adoption support commensurate with economic power, expanded support for single parents, and a shift toward a more non-discriminatory social perception. The following is a summary of the key points from our month-long interview with Dr. Hanna Sofia Johansson.

Professor takes note of the Prime Minister's words about possible compensation in the spiral case. This may have implications for other human rights cases between Greenland and Denmark.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen gave an official apology on behalf of Denmark for the third time in six years.

It was given to the Greenlandic girls and women who had IUDs inserted without consent as part of the so-called IUD case.

Compared to the Prime Minister's previous apologies, there is one thing that stands out.

Life imprisonment still exists, all families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.
 

Anyone who is now at least 40 years old remembers what they were doing the day Julie and Melissa's bodies were found, fourteen months after their disappearance. This legal case, which already had the country on tenterhooks, then plunged a little deeper into horror . It traumatized an entire country like no other had probably done before it, mixing the shameful dysfunctions between the gendarmerie and the police with the doubts and bottomless pain of the parents of the two girls; their lives were then irremediably plunged into an endless nightmare. Life imprisonment still exists, all the families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.

Belga

ABSTRACT 

India’s adoption laws reflect layers of history and belief. In 1890, the Guardians and Wards Act created a guardianship route for non-Hindu families, leaving the child tied to birthline inheritance. Sixty-six years later, the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act established a clear path for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists to adopt—and to grant full inheritance rights. A more open option emerged with the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act in 2015, inviting any citizen to take in an orphan or abandoned child. Yet the old Hindu statute remains alive, producing two parallel systems. That gap affects who can adopt, how quickly a child finds a home, and which rights a new family enjoys. This study traces each law’s origins, unpacks the holes they leave, and looks at how outcomes vary by community. It brings together a doctrinal analysis to build a single, cohesive adoption law- one that honors India’s constitution and its international obligations

A still from "The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger" (2010), Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung

Conference info

Co-organizers: Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University & Center for Korean Studies, University of Tübingen

Date: 7-8 May, 2026

Mirjam Hunze, 53, from Willemsoord, and her Chilean Adoptees Foundation have managed to find a biological mother for the first time. It's a breakthrough in a bizarre story of child theft and kidnapping that began in the 1970s. "I'm deeply moved."

It concerns Anna Nilson from Sweden, who had been searching for her biological mother in Chile for years. A successful DNA test provided the final answer: her mother was found.

This was achieved thanks to the efforts of Mirjam Hunze's foundation. "As a foundation, we are incredibly proud that we managed to travel to Chile ourselves and successfully administer a DNA test," she says.

Each year, women make the desperate decision to abandon their babies. Specially designed ‘baby windows’ can help – but some argue they make matters worse

When Romina discovered she was pregnant in 2021, she was 39 years old and homeless, without a euro to her name. She did what many a lonely and frightened woman has done throughout history, on learning that she was going to have a baby, and pretended she wasn’t. “If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist – something like that,” she told me, more than three years on.

By the time she noticed the changes in her body, she had been homeless for nearly seven years. Before that, she had lived a comfortable, secure life in The Hague, with a man she had fallen passionately in love with. But the man had become controlling, she said, preventing her from working or seeing her friends, spying on her and eventually threatening her if she left him.

She left him anyway, one night around Christmas 2014, and so opened a very dark chapter in a life that, to hear Romina, had already known its fair share of darkness – her parents’ divorce when she was three; years of sexual abuse at the hands of a stepfather; her mother’s many suicide attempts, the last of which, in 2009, succeeded; estrangement from her two half-siblings; and separation from her two sons (one of whom was just a toddler) after she entered into that last, abusive relationship, leaving them with their fathers.

Updated: Melania Trump wrote letter to Putin about protecting children

Editor's Note: This article was updated with additional details after U.S. President Donald Trump published the letter to social media on Aug. 17.

U.S. First Lady Melania Trump wrote a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin concerning Russia's abduction of Ukrainian children as he arrived in Alaska to meet U.S. President Donald Trump, Reuters reported on Aug. 16.

Trump handed the letter to Putin during the two leaders' nearly three-hour meeting on Aug. 15, two White House officials told Reuters. While the officials did not specify the letter's contents, they said it raised the plight of Russia kidnapping Ukrainian children.

Trump later published the full letter to his social media platform Truth Social on Aug. 17 in response to criticism of his meeting with Putin.

"Every child shares the same quiet dreams in their hearts, whether born randomly into a nation's rustic countryside or a magnificent city-center. They dream of love, possibility and safety from danger," the letter begins.

"Justice to this child is a factor not to be ignored. Rather, his assertion demands that truth be known, when truth has to be established, as it undoubtedly can," the Court said.

The Punjab and Haryana High Court recently held that a man's right to privacy cannot override the right of a child to know the identity of his father.

Justice Archana Puri passed the ruling while dismissing a revision petition that had challenged a trial court’s decision to allow a child’s plea for the comparison of his DNA sample with that of a man he claims to be his father.

“Justice to this child/plaintiff, is a factor, not to be ignored. Rather, his assertion demands that truth be known, when truth has to be established, as it undoubtedly can. Simultaneously, the right of defendant No.1 [man claimed to be father] to privacy and dignity, also has to be taken into consideration. However, the right of privacy, as such, cannot override the right of the child and vest interest in his favour,” the Court said.

However, the High Court added that the trial court's directive to allow the use of police force to ensure that there is no resistance by the defendant when his DNA sample is taken, was unnecessary.