The United Nations said that accusations that Moscow's forces had taken children from Ukraine to Russia for adoption were "credible". Ilze Brands Kehris, the assistant UN secretary-general for human rights, expressed concern that the Russian authorities had adopted a simplified procedure to grant Russian citizenship to children without parental care and these children would be eligible for adoption by Russian families.

Geneva: The United Nations on Wednesday said that accusations that Moscow's forces had taken children from Ukraine to Russia for adoption were "credible", reported AFP. Russia allegedly took children from Ukraine for adoption as part of larger-scale forced relocations and deportations.

"There have been credible allegations of forced transfers of unaccompanied children to Russian occupied territory, or to the Russian Federation itself," Ilze Brands Kehris, the assistant UN secretary-general for human rights, told the Security Council, as quoted by the news agency.

Brands Kehris expressed concern that the Russian authorities had adopted a simplified procedure to grant Russian citizenship to children without parental care and these children would be eligible for adoption by Russian families. She also accused Russia of running a "filtration" operation as Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territories were subjected to human rights violations.

The UN assistant secretary-general for human rights told a Security Council meeting that during filtration, Russian forces subjected people to body searches and sometimes even forced nudity. Brands Kehris further alleged that during filtration procedures, their mobile devices were searched and their fingerprints were taken.

Our Leadership

Michelle Bernier-Toth

Special Advisor for Children’s Issues
U.S. Department of State
Bureau of Consular Affairs

Sold as a baby, Jessi Fraud is now on a mission to expose the truth about the market in Romanian babies.

Jessi, a vibrant young Canadian journalist, is travelling the world to expose the post-communism practice of selling Romanian babies to adoptive parents by exploring the fate of Romanian children born to families too poor to care for them.

According to the vision of former President Nicolae Ceau?escu, babies should be born to boost the communist state’s decrepit economy.

As we become absorbed in Jessi’s journalistic quest, we slowly come to realise that it is more than a professional investigation. Jessi herself was sold as a child to an adoptive family in Canada.

An estimated 30,000 children were sold to adoption brokers in post-communist Romania. International buyers and local sellers met in hotel lobbies around Romania and negotiated prices that ranged from $5,000 to $10,000 for new-born Romanians.

Under considerationPE1958: Extend aftercare for previously looked after young people, and remove the continuing care age cap.

Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to:

Extend aftercare provision in Scotland to ‘previously looked after’ young people who left care before their 16th birthday, on the basis of individual need;

Extend continuing care throughout Care Experienced people’s lives, on the basis of individual need; and

Ensure Care Experienced people are able to enjoy lifelong rights and achieve equality with non-Care Experienced people. This includes ensuring that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the findings of The Promise are fully implemented in Scotland.

Terre des hommes (Tdh) was founded in 1960 and is the leading Swiss organisation for children’s aid.

Terre des hommes Foundation has been active in Romania continuously since 1992, contributing to the improvement of the child protection system and to the reform of social assistance. We also facilitate the participation of children in the development of their communities.

Each year, thousands of children and parents benefit from the projects that Tdh implements in Romania.

Priorities

In Romania, the Tdh Foundation is active in three areas of intervention:

Feminist and capitalism-critical perspectives on egg cell transfer and "surrogacy"

Online series of events organized by the Genetic Ethical Network eV in cooperation with the fem*ini network against reproductive exploitation

The traffic light coalition plans to explore ways to legalize "egg donation" and allegedly altruistic "surrogacy," according to the coalition agreement. The liberalization of these reproductive medical practices has been the subject of controversial debate for years. It is always about throwing the Embryo Protection Act, which has been in force since 1990, overboard. Little is made of the fact that these practices are being established in a field of commercialized medicine. On the one hand there are the parents who wish to have children and on the other hand the women who provide these services with their respective interests. Above all, there are those who exploit bodily substances and bodily services economically. This difference in interests is made socially acceptable under the veiled terms "donation" or "gift" and popularized with reference to alternative family forms. Against this background, it is necessary to shed light on these positions in order to critically intervene in the upcoming debates. In the online event series, we want to talk to invited guests about different aspects of the topic.

To register, please send an email to eizellspende[at]gen-ethisches-netzwerk.de.

program

Changes in law has transferred power of authorising adoptions from judiciary to collectors

BHUBANESWAR: For the orphaned and abandoned children living in child care institutions in Odisha, the recent amendment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act making adoption process simpler and faster has brought big hope of finding homes and parental love.

The changes in the law by the Centre has transferred the power of authorising adoptions from judiciary to district collectors, making the process less time consuming and hassle-free.Currently, 129 children (50 boys and 69 girls) in the State have been declared legally free for adoption. Similarly, 67 children with special needs (30 boys and 37 girls) are awaiting adoption, according to the State Adoption Resource Agency (SARA) of the State Women and Child Development (WCD) department.

Usually, children in the age group of 0 to 2 years are the most preferred for adoption in the State. Of the children legally ready for adoption, five normal and four with special needs are in the age group of 0 to 2, while the highest number of 117 children (97 normal and 20 differently-abled) are in the age group of 14 to 18.

Child rights activists, however, state that the number of children legally ready for adoption must be much more. Prior to Covid-19 outbreak, the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (OSCPCR) had identified 33,000 orphans in the State. Of them, around 8,700 are housed in child care institutions. During the pandemic, nearly 25,000 children were orphaned.

Every year in South Korea, some 2,500 adolescents leave the foster care group homes where they spent their formative years, forced to stand on their own two feet.

Trying to figure out life on their own, these young people often face financial and psychological difficulties, but their struggles go unheard, as they are legal adults.

Last month in Gwangju, two such young people gave up on their lives just days apart, which has brought attention to the strife of those who have aged out of the state care system.

The Korea Herald talked to two of them.

Future on hold

ANNEX “SEARCH FOR ORIGINS” COLOMBIA ACCESS TO ORIGINS IN COLOMBIA Historical context of adoption in the country Adoption was initially defined in the Civil Code Arts. 269 to 287, and the grounds for withdrawing the adoption were the same as those that served as grounds to disinherit a legitimate beneficiary. With the entry into force of Law 140 of 1960, the notion of adoption changed into a protection measure for children, acceding to the fact that, those who had no offspring could have it with the purpose of making the child a beneficiary of the adopter’s parental care and affection, but it denied the possibility of extramarital children being adopted by their father. This changed with Law 75 of 1968. Law 5 of 1975 proposed the irrevocability of adoption in two ways: full and simple. In addition, it provided that only the ICBF and institutions duly authorised by the ICBF may carry out the Adoption Programme. Decree 2737 of 1989 (Juvenile Code) eliminated simple adoption, focusing on the express concept of a protection measure. It also established that all documents and proceedings relating to the adoption process would be kept for a term of 30 years. From this moment on, adoption records began to be preserved and kept in the different archives of the ICBF and IAPAS. Subsequently, Law 1098 of 2006 aligned adoption with the requirements of the CRC and the 1993 Hague Convention on Adoption, structuring the entire rights reinstatement protocol, leaving adoption as the last resort to provide a protection measure for a child. In addition, the legal reserve was reduced to 20 years. The only people who would have access to them are those established by law. For the purpose of a more careful and rigorous approach regarding confidentiality and safekeeping of documents, some years later, all documents pertaining to adoption processes are centralised, either in the Central Archives of the Regional Offices or in the Central Archive at the Headquarters of the Directorate General of the ICBF, where they remain to this day. Source: Miryam Alejandra Toro Mesa. Adopción en Colombia: concepto, evolución legislativa frente al consentimiento y trámite como medida de protección dentro del proceso de restablecimiento de derechos, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2019; Questionnaire on the practical operation of the 1993 Adoption Convention Prel. Doc. No. 3 of February 2020 for the Special Commission meeting for 2021, Question 1.

Six countries are in focus in the government investigation of the international adoption agency to Sweden: Sri Lanka, Poland, China, South Korea, Colombia and Chile.