During a trilateral meeting European Commission Vice-President Šuica, Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Mijatovi? and Eurochild President Coleiro-Preca, expressed their deep concern about the impacts of the anti-child rights movements on children and civil society. Evidence was provided by Eurochild’s President, staff and children from Eurochild members, the National Network for Children in Bulgaria and the Hungarian Child Rights Coalition.

European Commission Vice-President Šuica and Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Mijatovi? expressed their solidarity and strong support for children’s rights and for Eurochild members and children experiencing threats and attacks when advocating for children’s rights.

Attacks on human rights and human rights defenders – including those upholding and defending children’s rights – are not new. Eurochild, its members and other children’s rights organisations have been voicing concerns about anti-child rights movements in several countries across Europe.[1] Such movements have threatened many NGOs and silenced them due to fear of sanctions.

Children’s rights activists have been attacked in public and on social media. In response, mechanisms [2] at EU level, such as ProtectDefenders.eu, which is led by a consortium of human rights organisations and funded by the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights, provide protection for human rights defenders at risk for their activities worldwide. However, there are no mechanisms with a specific focus on children’s rights to monitor and counteract anti-child rights movements in Europe, and their harmful rhetoric and actions, despite the growing impact on child human rights defenders.

Vice President Šuica recalled that civil society is vital for a healthy democracy and a society where people can effectively enjoy their rights. She emphasised that we need a strong and independent civil society to foster an open and pluralist space for debate and citizens’ participation to the democratic life of the EU, and to support victims of fundamental rights violations, especially children.

Open adoption to unmarried couples or even lower the minimum age required for parents. These are the objectives defended by the LREM bill that Parliament is preparing to approve definitively this Tuesday, by a final vote of the deputies. The National Assembly, which has the last word, must validate at the end of the day the proposal of MP Monique Limon, which dates back to mid-2020 and is part of a series of societal markers at the end of Emmanuel Macron's five -year term. .

Flagship measure, the opening of full adoption to PACS couples or cohabitants must put an end to "discrimination relating to the rules of union or homoparenthood ", considers Coralie Dubost (LREM). Currently, only one member of the couple can adopt the child. The bill also lowers the minimum age required for each adopter, from 28 to 26 years. And the minimum duration of community life is reduced from two to one year. One or other of these conditions is required to apply for accreditation.

The text also aims to improve the functioning of family councils, supervisory bodies of the wards of the State in the departments. The family council will only include one member selected for his skills in the medical, psychological or social field, instead of two child protection experts.

Discussions were lively on a provision which will open up the possibility, for couples of women who have had recourse to medically assisted procreation (PMA) abroad and since separated, to the woman who has not given birth to adopt the child despite the opposition of the mother. This "tinkering" that can lead to "forced adoptions", according to the right, has displeased even the MoDem, an ally of LREM.

More than 10,000 approvals in progress

By Stefanie Bode, This article was adapted from the speech Stefanie gave at #FiLiA2021 during the UNsynced Panel.

The Latest Moves to Regulate “Surrogacy” on a Global Level

As feminists, we reject the idea that women can lease their bodies for a pregnancy; and that women can consent to the trafficking of their babies. No matter if this practice has the label of “altruistic” or “commercial” surrogacy.

It’s always harmful. It harms our health, it exploits our bodies; it’s dependent on global inequalities and makes them worse; it violates our dignity, our physical integrity and many others of our human rights. It is a form of slavery (of women and children), and obviously it’s violence against women and children. It makes babies into commodities. It’s very cruel and inhumane to women and babies to separate a baby from its mother.

So we want to stop the practice, worldwide. And this is also what the Declaration on Women’s Sex Based Rights is saying. Everything else is whitewashing of a highly abusive practice.

"The Final Case" is a novel, but closely based on the tragic death of Hana Williams, which I covered as a reporter

In May 2011, a 13-year-old girl named Hana Williams was killed by her adoptive parents in a rural town in Washington state's tulip country, an hour or so north of Seattle. She had been adopted from Ethiopia three years earlier, into an isolated, fundamentalist Christian family, and for much of that time endured almost incomprehensible abuse: Hana was shunned by her adoptive parents and their seven biological children and was made to sleep variously in a barn, a locked shower room and ultimately a locked closet too small to lie down in. She was fed frozen food, compelled to use an outdoor toilet, repeatedly shorn of her braids, and regularly beaten with a variety of implements. When she died, late on a cold and rainy spring night, she had been kept outside for hours until hypothermia caused her to fall down repeatedly, ultimately leaving her face down in the mud. When her adoptive mother finally called 911, she suggested to the operator that Hana had killed herself as a final act of rebellion.

Hana's death is among the most upsetting cases in a small roster — although not small enough — of stories of extreme abuse suffered by adoptees at the hands of the families who took them in. Two years after Hana died, I traveled to Mount Vernon, Washington, to cover the beginning of the murder trial of her adoptive parents, Carri and Larry Williams, who were ultimately convicted of assault, manslaughter and, in Carri's case, homicide by abuse. The trial was an often-searing experience, eliciting cries and gasps from the gallery when autopsy photos of Hana's bruised, emaciated body were shown, or when her younger brother, the only other adoptee in the family, used sign language to testify that he didn't understand where his sister had gone. It was also surreal to emerge from the courtroom into the bright sun of an idyllic Pacific Northwest summer. At times during the weeks I attended, I found myself spontaneously weeping at traffic lights around the town.

I wasn't alone. Besides the parties to the case, and the Williamses' family, a small crew of regular observers filed into the courtroom gallery each day, often including delegations from the greater Seattle Ethiopian diaspora, and a handful of heartsick adoptive parents, who could too easily imagine their children having ended up in the Williams home instead. One of those parents was David Guterson, author of the bestselling novel "Snow Falling on Cedars," who attended all but one day of the seven-week trial — the longest trial in county history, at least that the prosecutor could recall. At first, Guterson says, he came as an adoptive parent, in solidarity with the region's Ethiopian community. In time, he came to feel that Hana's life required a longer-lasting sort of witness.

This January, Guterson published his new novel, "The Final Case," which tracks many of the contours of Hana's and the Williamses' story — rendered in the novel as Abeba and the Harveys — intertwining a story of shocking cruelty with the more pedestrian tragedies of the narrator's life, as his father, an effectively retired criminal defense attorney, assumes the thankless task of representing Betsy Harvey. It's a story suffused with loss — whether in its monstrous forms or as the "eternal human norm" — and the question of how to live a meaningful life in the face of both. The narrator encounters all this as a midlife novelist who thought he'd left fiction writing behind. "If that leaves you wondering about this book — " the narrator says at one point, "wondering if I'm kidding, or playing a game, or if I've wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction — everything here is real."

Growing up, Adam Benz always believed he had been left in a shoebox by the side of the road when only a few days old. Now, 35 years later, he has tracked down his biological family and learned there is much more to his story.

From a very young age, Adam Benz - or Christiano Rufino dos Santos - wanted to know more about his Brazilian roots, but didn't know where to start.

Adopted by an American family, Mr Benz lived in the United States before moving permanently to Western Australia.

It was here in Perth, where the Brazilian community has flourished over recent decades, that his desire to track down his biological parents grew.

“Brazilians are everywhere here in Perth. I've been much more exposed to Brazilian culture than I've ever been. This motivated me to look for my parents and to want to learn Portuguese,” he says.

On December 1st, the Supreme Court had its day of oral argument in a landmark abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, brought by the State of Mississippi. It was the first case that the Court had taken in thirty years in which the petitioners were explicitly asking the Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which affirmed that decision in 1992. If anyone needed a reminder that, whatever the Justices decide in Dobbs, it will not reconcile the American divide over abortion, the chaotic scene outside the Court made it clear. At the base of the marble steps, reproductive-rights supporters held a large rally in which they characterized abortion as a human right—and an act of health care. Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic U.S. representative from Washington State, described herself as “one of the one in four women in America who have had an abortion,” adding, “Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but it was my choice.” Jayapal could barely be heard, though, over the anti-abortion protesters who had also gathered, in even greater numbers. The day was sunny and mild, and though some of these demonstrators offered the usual angry admonishments—“God is going to punish you, murderer!” a man with a megaphone declaimed—most members of the anti-abortion contingent seemed buoyant. Busloads of students from Liberty University, an evangelical college in Lynchburg, Virginia, snapped selfies in their matching red-white-and-blue jackets. Penny Nance, the head of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, exclaimed, “This is our moment! This is why we’ve marched all these years!”

A major reason for Nance’s optimism was the presence on the bench of Amy Coney Barrett, the former Notre Dame law professor and federal-court judge whom President Donald Trump had picked to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on September 18, 2020. With the help of Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, Trump had accelerated Barrett’s nomination process, and the Senate confirmed her just a week before the 2020 Presidential election. As a candidate in the 2016 election, Trump had vowed to appoint Justices who would overturn Roe, and as President he had made it a priority to stock the judiciary with conservative judges—especially younger ones. According to an analysis by the law professors David Fontana, of the George Washington University, and Micah Schwartzman, of the University of Virginia, Trump’s nominees to the federal courts of appeals—bodies that, like the Supreme Court, confer lifetime tenure—were the youngest of any President’s “since at least the beginning of the 20th century.” Trump made three Supreme Court appointments, and Neil Gorsuch (forty-nine when confirmed) and Brett Kavanaugh (fifty-three) were the youngest of the nine Justices until Barrett was sworn in, at the age of forty-eight. Her arrival gave the conservative wing of the Court a 6–3 supermajority—an imbalance that won’t be altered by the recent news that one of the three liberal Justices, Stephen Breyer, is retiring.

Barrett has a hard-to-rattle temperament. A fitness enthusiast seemingly blessed with superhuman energy, she is rearing seven children with her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former prosecutor now in private practice. At her confirmation hearings, she dressed with self-assurance—a fitted magenta dress; a ladylike skirted suit in unexpected shades of purple—and projected an air of decorous, almost serene diligence. Despite her pro-forma circumspection, her answers on issues from guns to climate change left little doubt that she would feel at home on a Court that is more conservative than it’s been in decades. Yet she also represented a major shift. Daniel Bennett, a professor at John Brown University, a Christian college in Arkansas, who studies the intersection of faith and politics, told me that Barrett is “more embedded in the conservative Christian legal movement than any Justice we’ve ever had.” Outside the Court, Nance emphasized this kinship, referring to Barrett as “Sister Amy, on the inside.”

In recent years, conservatives have been intent on installing judges who will not disappoint by becoming more centrist over time. Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy sided with liberal Justices in a few notable cases, including ones that allowed same-sex marriage and upheld Roe. David Souter, who had become a federal judge just months before President George H. W. Bush nominated him to the Court, in 1990, moved leftward enough that “No More Souters” became a conservative slogan. A decade ago, Chief Justice John Roberts committed the unpardonable sin of providing a critical vote to keep the Affordable Care Act in place. In 2020, the seemingly stalwart Gorsuch delivered a blow, writing the majority opinion in a case which held that civil-rights legislation protected gay and transgender workers from discrimination. On the Senate floor, Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who later attempted to discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential election, declared that Gorsuch’s opinion marked the end of “the conservative legal project as we know it”—the “originalist” jurisprudence, prominent since the nineteen-eighties, that claims to be guided by the textual intent of the Founding Fathers. It was time, Hawley said, for “religious conservatives to take the lead.” Four months later, that new era unofficially began, when Barrett joined the Court.

For decades, leading members of the Federalist Society and other conservative legal associations have vetted potential appellate judges and Justices and provided recommendations to Republican Presidents. The Federalist Society has traditionally showcased judges with records of high academic distinction, often at élite schools; service in Republican Administrations; originalist loyalties; and a record of decisions on the side of deregulation and corporations. Barrett hadn’t served in an Administration, and, unlike the other current Justices, she hadn’t attended an Ivy League law school. She went to Notre Dame, and returned there to teach. These divergences, though, ended up becoming points in her favor—especially at a time when religious activists were playing a more influential role in the conservative legal movement. Notre Dame, which is just outside South Bend, Indiana, is a Catholic institution in a deeply red state, and it’s one of the relatively few well-respected law schools where progressives do not abound. Barrett’s grounding in conservative Catholicism, and even her large family, began to seem like qualifications, too. Andrew Lewis, a University of Cincinnati political scientist who studies faith-based advocacy, told me that religious conservatives often used to feel “looked down upon by some of the original Federalist Society members.” But, he went on, “they have increasingly gained power, and their concerns have become more central to the project.”

It’s been over five years since a case was filed against independent journalist Neha Dixit for criminal defamation and promoting “disharmony, enmity, hatred or ill-will” through a five-part series she wrote for Outlook magazine in 2016.

Since then, the case has been listed approximately 40 times in the Gauhati High Court. Dixit has spent over Rs 3 lakh on legal and travel fees, has appeared in the high court five times, and, she said, has received no support from Outlook in the process.

“The process is the punishment,” Dixit told Newslaundry, “because it is harassment in a way.”

The series in question was Outlook’s cover story in its July 29, 2016 edition. Titled “Operation #BetiUthao”, it uncovered how the Sangh Parivar “flouted every Indian and international law on child right to traffic 31 young tribal girls from Assam to Punjab and Gujarat to ‘Hinduise’ them”.

Days later, on August 6 that year, then assistant solicitor general SC Koyal and BJP spokesperson Bijon Mahajan filed a criminal complaint against Dixit under sections 153A (promoting disharmony, enmity, etc) and 499 (defamation) of the Indian Penal Code.

Will lengthening adoption wait and new surrogacy-artificial reproductive assistance laws push couples closer to black market adoption?

On a flight from Mumbai to Delhi last week, this writer happened to sit next to a young couple who became parents for the first time in the pandemic. During the small-talk that followed, they revealed that the baby wasn’t their biological offspring. After unsuccessfully trying to conceive for six years, they got “lucky” when their friend’s sister-in-law, who couldn’t afford to raise her third child, sought a home for her son. “After much consideration, we took her baby boy,” the mother shared. The couple hadn’t even given adoption or surrogacy a thought, because of how “tedious the process has become”.

With adoption in India being routed by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) and the government recently notifying new laws to regulate surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology, several Indian couples are deferring their dreams to become parents. Experts, however, fear that many desperate couples might go the illegal way.

Infertility is at the heart of the problem. According to research conducted by Inito, a Bengaluru-based medical technology company, around 27.5 million couples who want to conceive, currently suffer from infertility. The World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision report estimated that the fertility rate of Indians (measured as the number of children born to a woman), had plummeted by more than half in the short span of 40 years—from 4.97 per cent during 1975-80 to 2.3 per cent in 2015-20. By 2025-30, the report projects that the rate would have nosedived further to 2.1. A fertility rate of about 2.2 is generally considered the replacement level—the rate at which the population would hold steady. When the fertility rate dips below this number, the population is expected to decline.

With lowering fertility, adoption and surrogacy seem to be the next best options for couples. But recent protocol and laws have complicated the state of affairs.

Will lengthening adoption wait and new surrogacy-artificial reproductive assistance laws push couples closer to black market adoption?

On a flight from Mumbai to Delhi last week, this writer happened to sit next to a young couple who became parents for the first time in the pandemic. During the small-talk that followed, they revealed that the baby wasn*t their biological offspring. After unsuccessfully trying to conceive for six years, they got "lucky" when their friend*s sister-in-law, who couldn*t afford to raise her third child, sought a home for her son. "After much consideration, we took her baby boy," the mother shared. The couple hadn*t even given adoption or surrogacy a thought, because of how "tedious the process has become".

With adoption in India being routed by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) and the government recently notifying new laws to regulate surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology, several Indian couples are deferring their dreams to become parents. Experts, however, fear that many desperate couples might go the illegal way.

Infertility is at the heart of the problem. According to research conducted by Inito, a Bengaluru-based medical technology company, around 27.5 million couples who want to conceive, currently suffer from infertility. The World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision report estimated that the fertility rate of Indians (measured as the number of children born to a woman), had plummeted by more than half in the short span of 40 years - from 4.97 per cent during 1975-80 to 2.3 per cent in 2015-20. By 2025-30, the report projects that the rate would have nosedived further to 2.1. A fertility rate of about 2.2 is generally considered the replacement level - the rate at which the population would hold steady. When the fertility rate dips below this number, the population is expected to decline.

With lowering fertility, adoption and surrogacy seem to be the next best options for couples. But recent protocol and laws have complicated the state of affairs.

In the absence of legal clarity, the Delhi high court has sought responses from the Union and Delhi governments in the matter, after a hospital in the national capital refused to return the frozen semen sample of a deceased cancer patient to his family.

The parents of the deceased had moved the high court in December last year after authorities of Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital refused to give them the frozen semen sample of their son, which they may use to continue the family line.

There is no law, policy or legal procedure in our country to decide as to who should be handed over the semen sample of an unmarried deceased man, the hospital told the high court while opposing a plea to handover the sperm samples to the family of a 30-year-old cancer patient who died in September 2020.

The hospital has said that the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Act, ICMR guidelines, Surrogacy Bill/Act are “silent” about the legal heirs of the unmarried deceased man to whom the frozen semen sample is to be released.

The hospital has said that in absence of any guidelines, regulation and direction on this issue of disposal and utilisation of semen samples of an unmarried person, they are unable to make final disposal of the frozen semen sample of the deceased. It sought that the court may pass appropriate orders considering the current scenario.