December 2005/February 2006

I was offered a new job in DG ELARG by a Head of Unit I had worked with before: coordination of financial programming for civil society and the social sector for accession countries. He had contacted me, saying the COM was trying to kick me out, so it was better to start working now. I started part-time. In January I started working full time. I liked the job and was quickly up and running.

However, end January intimidations had restarted and a sudden minor re-organisation meant that my job would resort under another Head of Unit with whom I had bad experience on Romanian children. Destabilised I entered again in sick leave.

HoU Simon Mordue

No chrono's from Cabinet Verheugen sent to Central Archives

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Roelie.POST@cec.eu.int [SMTP:Roelie.POST@cec.eu.int]

> Sent: Thursday, November 25, 1999 8:30 PM

> To: simon.mordue@rom.eudel.com; mariela.neagu@rom.eudel.com

> Subject: FDC

Simon Mordue, Mariela Neague, Daniela Gheorghe, Chris Walker

Roelie Post (took the picture)

BUCHAREST, Romania — Nicolae Craciun’s mother put him in a state-run children’s home at age 5, then didn’t visit for a year and a half.

Now she sees him every Saturday and wants to take him home to join his three siblings. Nicolae, 10, says wistfully that he would love to return to the place he remembers from “a long time ago.”

But officials in charge of his welfare say that, short of a court order, the children’s home must keep Nicolae. “She’s not the mother, by the law. She’s just another person,” said Claudia Prichia, the administrator in charge of the case.

Romania’s child welfare system has largely eliminated the worst of the horrors exposed after the 1989 fall of communism, when as many as 150,000 children were institutionalized in a vast network of homes where malnutrition, AIDS and prison-like conditions devastated young lives.

In place of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s policies, which encouraged population growth by banning contraception and abortion but made it easy to dump children into institutions, the government now favors family reunification and prevention of abandonment.

Table of contents: 

1. Introduction 

2. Background and literary review: - 2.1 Figures on child abandonment - 2.2 Literary review - 2.3 Cultural-historical heritage: the pro-natalist polices of the communist eve 

3. Data collection - 3.1 Data collection: the consulting room in Braşov - 3.2 The hospital of Valcea: The project by World Vision - 3.3 Problems in the data collection 

4. Analysis and data description - 4.1 Descriptive statistics - 4.2 Analysis 

Antwerp, Saturday March 4, 2023 : “At the beginning of February, Minister Crevits announced that the Ancestry Center will receive an additional 100,000 euros in subsidies annually.” starts Steph Raeymaekers, chairman of Donorkinderen vzw. “There is nothing wrong with allocating additional resources, but we do not understand why this happened without any audit of their operation or delivery of effective results.”

The Flemish Descent Center was founded in 2020 to respond to parentage questions from various groups: adoptees, donor children, metis, distance parents, etc. The operating framework is rather limited, as it  must not violate other legislation.

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For example, donor children may only find their donor father or mother through the center by voluntarily registering their DNA in the database of the Center for Genetics in Leuven. Only if there is a first-degree match that confirms the parent-child relationship can they come into contact with each other.

This restriction was included very specifically in the decree because other existing legislation prioritises the anonymity of donors. In this way, the aim is to avoid finding information via a detour or without mutual consent. 

Donorkinderen vzw established that employees affiliated with the Ancestry Center trace donor parents through international DNA databases and the development of family trees. The Descent Center thus violates the founding and operating decree.

134 people have already come forward with questions about their adoption. Some adoptions date back sixty or more years. About twenty reports concern adoptions after 2000.

In the past, several signals were given of possible irregularities in the adoption of Ethiopian children who came to Belgium between 1997 and 2015, after mediation by the adoption agency Ray of Hope.

In November last year it was confirmed that in some cases reality had been ignored. Researchers who traveled to the country on behalf of Flemish Minister of Welfare Hilde Crevits (CD&V) and examined twelve adoption files found that in at least one case parents had not consciously given their child up for adoption. This was no surprise to some adoptive parents and adoptees: they had already discovered it themselves.

Following these initial results, the minister launched a broad appeal: anyone who had questions about their own adoption or that of their child could report them. 134 people have already done that.

This concerns reports of adoptions dating back to the 1960s and 1950s, as well as adoptions from after 2000. There are 21 countries of origin.

The chair of a parliamentary committee looking into past forced adoption practices in WA is facing calls from a group of adoptee campaigners to step down from the inquiry.

It’s been revealed Peter Foster – a WA politician who chairs the state’s Standing Committee on Environment and Public Affairs – used an overseas commercial surrogate to have a child.

Forced adoption survivor Jen McRae believes it presents a conflict of interest, as similar issues can be faced by children who were forcibly adopted and children born via commercial surrogacy.

LiSTNR News has spoken with Ms McRae, and other adoptees who claim both children of forced adoption and commercial surrogacy can experience issues around trauma, attachment and identity.

Commercial surrogacy is illegal across Australia.

PROJECT AIMS

The rapidly growing refugee crisis sparked by the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 saw Lumos, along with many other child rights protection organisations, shift towards the provision of humanitarian aid. Thanks to the support of both international and local partners and donors, we’ve been able to provide urgent life-changing support to internally displaced families in Ukraine as well as to refugees settling in Moldova.

One such partnership has been the implementation of the “Ukrainian Refugee Crisis Response in Moldova” project, financed by Terre des Hommes Netherlands and started in December 2022. The six-month project had a total budget of just under 200,000 Euros and was designed to support local authorities from four districts – Floreşti, Ialoveni, Glodeni and Teleneşti – in their efforts to provide help and support for refugee children and families hosted by local families. The project’s main objectives were:

• To help refugee children and their families meet their basic and essential needs
• To facilitate appropriate access to educational and healthcare services for refugee children
• To engage these children in community child and youth participation activities
• To strengthen capacities of the national and local public authorities, service providers, frontline specialists and other professionals as well as local NGOs to provide an effective emergency response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.