Catherine Irene Jacqueline Meyer, Baroness Meyer,[1] CBE (née Laylle; born 26 January 1953), is a British politician and businesswoman. She is the widow of Sir Christopher Meyer, the British former Ambassador to the United States. In 1999, she founded the charity PACT, now Action Against Abduction. In October 2020, she was appointed as the Prime Minister's Trade Envoy to Ukraine.[2]

Background

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Meyer was privately educated at the French Lycée in London, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the London School of Economics. She began her career in financial services and became a licensed commodity broker in 1979, working for Merrill Lynch, Dean Witter and E.F. Hutton.

Biography and child advocacy

With the entry into force of the revised European Directive on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings ((EU) 2024/1712), illegal adoption has been identified as a new form of human trafficking. The directive does not explain under which circumstances illegal adoption falls under exploitation. In view of the future amendment of the law in the Netherlands, a graduation research was conducted at the EMM on abuses in the intercountry adoption chain and the impact of these abuses on victims.

Interviews with victims

In the graduation research, fifteen victims of abuses in the adoption chain were interviewed. Their adoptions took place between 1975 and 2001. The now adult adopted respondents came across illegal and unethical practices during their search for their adoption history. In the interviews, they tell what they discovered about the events preceding their adoption procedure and the course of the procedure.

Types of abuse

En December morning in 1978, Claudia Alejandra Svane sat on a plane to Denmark. She had a stack of papers with her. If the five-year-old Claudia could read, she would see that she was born out of wedlock and that she therefore now had to go to Denmark to be an adopted child.

The papers also contained gruesome details: She had allegedly been found abandoned and hungry in front of a church in Santiago de Chile – the capital of Chile. She had no parents.

That was the story her Danish adoptive parents Alisa and Ole were told. That was the story she herself grew up with in an otherwise incredibly safe childhood home in the small town of Manna near Brønderslev in North Jutland. That was the story she and the adoptive parents believed. That was the truth.

But it was all a lie. The papers were fabricated.

In the real world, at the age of three or four, little Claudia had come to the hospital in Chile's capital with an inflamed head wound. Records show how the hospital would keep her overnight. And when her mother came to collect Claudia the next day, the doctors told her that the young girl had died. The mother demanded to see her daughter's body, she came several days in a row, she protested, complained, maybe cried, but the doctors refused to hand over the body. And so it turned out. And all the while, money changed hands, and Claudia was secretly sent to Denmark.

 Hyderabad: A two-judge panel of the Telangana High Court ordered status quo with regard to custody of a child in a writ appeal challenging the order of the single judge. The single judge while hearing a batch of writ petitions had declared the actions of the women development and child welfare department and others in forcefully taking away custody of minor children from the adoptive parents as illegal. The HC panel, comprising Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice J. Sreenivas Rao, were dealing with a writ appeal filed by the directorate of women development and child welfare department aggrieved by the order of the single judge in a batch of writ petitions. The writ appellant contended that the respondents, who are the adoptive parents of a minor girl, are not entitled to her custody as they have not followed the procedures prescribed under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 and Adoption Regulations, 2022. The panel, after hearing the additional advocate general and the counsel for the respondents, passed a status quo order with regard to the custody of the child with the appellant. Meanwhile, the panel directed the appellant to process the application of the respondent seeking custody of the child expeditiously preferably within two months. The matter was posted for further hearing.

HC refuses to enlarge on bail white-collar crimes accused

Justice J. Sridevi of the Telangana High Court refused to enlarge on bail Vansh Kumar Jangid, who, with his wife, is alleged to have committed various white collar offences. It is further alleged that the modus operandi of the petitioner and his wife was to threaten people with legal consequences if they did not pay up certain amounts. According to the prosecution, the petitioner and the principal accused would open false accounts and swindle money. The petitioner contended that he had no financial gains from the transactions and that the beneficiary accused was already enlarged on bail. The public prosecutor opposed the bail on the ground that the petitioner had earlier escaped from custody while being brought on a PT warrant to Hyderabad. The petitioner’s version, however, was that in a crowded railway station he had lost touch with the police and had surrendered himself in Delhi, when the court found that the remand report was incomplete, the judge adjourned the matter.

Suman TV anchor draws HC flak

Justice B. Vijaysen Reddy of the Telangana High Court was highly critical of the manner in which anchor Roshan of Suman TV was making posts and turning around playing the victim card. The judge was dealing with a specially mentioned petition filed by G.S. Vasa Reddy complaining against the Jubilee Hills police for not acting upon a complaint lodged by him against Girish Daramoni, a YouTuber. According to the petitioner he had interviewed a female ‘aghori’, which had 1.6 million hits. According to the petitioner, the respondent uploaded a video with demeaning content in which he made disparaging remarks targeting the petitioner. It is also alleged that he had incited viewers against Suman TV. According to the petitioner, the respondent was instigating viewers against the petitioner and making hate speeches and the police were not taking any action. The judge directed the petitioners to approach the police with a representation on the basis of which the police would consider the case.

The report is intended to assess efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to safeguard minors and others. Advocates for survivors called it an exercise in obfuscation.

Ten years after it was established, a Vatican commission on clerical sexual abuse issued its first report on Tuesday, a limited step in self-accounting by some bishops that was immediately criticized by victims advocates as toothless and lacking independent verification.

Since the clerical abuse scandal erupted into the mainstream media two decades ago, the church has struggled to put in place effective measures around the world to end abuse and hold the church hierarchy accountable when it was involved in covering up cases.

The Vatican group, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, was formed in 2014 to advise Pope Francis on how best to protect minors and vulnerable adults from sexual predators among the clergy. Last year, Francis also charged the commission with verifying that countries were following a new church law that set out rules for reporting and combating clerical sexual abuse.

Thousands of South Korean children were adopted by Australian families under false pretences, according to investigations by both the Associated Press and the ABC. The agency responsible for facilitating adoptions since 1978, Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS), allegedly claimed children were orphans when, in reality, those children were received from hospital workers who had been bribed by the agency.

Many of the 3,600 adoptees, now aged in their thirties, had unusually similar case files: born to a single mother, and orphaned. In interviews with the ABC, adult adoptees said their own research had proven their biological parents were alive and had been misled in some cases into believing their child would be adopted by a Korean family. South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is now investigating hundreds of adoptee cases and has already confirmed an extensive campaign of deceptive falsification of documents. Australia has not launched an official investigation.

In August, Senator Linda Reynolds called for a broader parliamentary inquiry into intercountry adoption practices, seeking a stop to all international adoptions until more comprehensive safeguards are in place to prevent “trafficking” of orphans.

Quiet migration poses concern over processes

As Melbourne University academics Jay Song and Ryan Gustafsson wrote in 2023, while intercountry is a form of migration, it is not often viewed as such. They wrote in their paper ‘Korean Adoption to Australia as Quiet and Orderly Child Migration’ that “Adoption involves what Anne Collinson (2007) has termed ‘the littlest immigrants’ who, as children, are disempowered and not afforded a voice, and rarely portrayed in the Western media as immigrants. Child/infant migrants remain in the shadow of their adult custodians. They have no agency nor the means to express their consent in the migration and settlement process, which is often considered a private, family affair.”

Vijayawada:After receiving a complaint, police have started an inquiry into the alleged illegal adoption of a baby girl by a childless couple in Narasaraopet, Palnadu district. The women and child development authorities said that an illegal adoption of a months-old baby girl by a woman came to their notice. The childless mother wanted a child and adopted the baby girl, reportedly unaware of the adoption rules.

Meanwhile, the police have started the inquiry on the issue amid allegations that money was involved in the illegal adoption and also the issue was not limited to just one baby as there were reports of a few more babies given in adoption for money. Palnadu district women and child development project director Uma Rani said, “It has come to our notice about the unauthorised adoption of a baby girl by a woman with no children, probably unaware of the norms to do so. We have alerted the police on the issue to take up inquiry.”  

Tilbagekaldelse af tilladelse til at yde adoptionshjælp vedrørende børn med bopæl i Sydafrika 

Jeg har i dag truffet afgørelse om at stoppe adoptionsformidlingen af børn fra Sydafrika. 

Da Danish International Adoption (DIA) fortsat har tilladelse til at yde adoptionshjælp vedrørende børn fra udlandet, og da tilladelsen vedrørende Sydafrika er givet til DIA, betyder dette, at DIA ikke længere kan bistå ansøgere med at gennemføre en adoption fra Sydafrika. Det betyder således også, at der efter DIAs ophør ikke foreligger tilladelse til at yde adoptionshjælp vedrørende Sydafrika. 

Sending unwanted offspring abroad, bringing desired children to Switzerland – since the 1950s, Switzerland has been involved in a systematic child transfer.

Shortly :

• Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, around 2,200 children were adopted from India.
• Reports confirm systematic child trafficking and failures of the Swiss authorities.
• Documented irregularities include missing signatures and contradictory information.
• To make their work easier, officials noted “mother unknown” on numerous birth certificates.

Some were found on the streets, others were taken to children's homes by relatives - many were taken away from their mothers immediately after birth.

In the sixties and seventies, getting pregnant without being married was a big taboo in the Netherlands. Thousands of girls and young women therefore kept their pregnancies secret and gave birth to their child in isolation. Many of them were then forced by social pressure and circumstances to give up their baby.

The children ended up in homes or special children's departments, such as the Midwifery School in Heerlen. They were then adopted by parents who had often been waiting for a child for a long time. Although people thought adoption was a good idea at the time, it turns out that the impact of the events continues to have a long-lasting effect, both on the mothers and the adopted children and on the adoptive parents.

The four-part television series Dossier Afgestaan ​​brings together the personal stories of birth mothers, adopted children, adoptive parents and care providers.

In the series, various women talk about their experiences with unwanted pregnancies at a young age. Their babies were sometimes taken away immediately after birth, and they themselves had to continue with their lives as if nothing had happened. After a few days, for example, they went back to school or training and hardly anyone knew that they had become mothers. "When I came home from Moederheil, my father literally said: it is not talked about anymore," says a certain Cecilia.