I shouldn’t ever take my adoptive parents for granted. Life hasn’t been perfect since I was adopted. But I wouldn’t change how it has played out for anything.

Thanks to advances in DNA testing and a dash of Hollywood theatrics (I’m looking at you, “Lion”), there has been an increased discussion and focus among Indian adoptees wanting to find their biological parents and other family members.

However, I have never been or will ever be one of those adoptees. While I completely understand and support the desire to know and possibly reconnect with biological relatives, in my mind my adoptive family is my one and only family.

Truth be told, the only time in my life I’ve wondered about my biological parents was in elementary school when I still had dreams of being a professional basketball player. I just wanted to know how tall my parents were — in hopes that maybe I’d grow a few inches taller. Alas, that was not meant to be.

A large reason for my lack of interest in searching for my biological family is because my adoptive parents did one thing very well: they did their best to keep me and my siblings aware of and connected to my heritage.

The Swedish government is opening an investigation into thousands of forced adoptions during the Chilean dictatorship

BARCELONA “You will never see your child again. It's somewhere in Europe. " With these words, Clas Lindholm's mother learned that she had been deceived and that her newborn son had been stolen. Lindholm, who arrived in Sweden in 1975 at just a few weeks old, discovered when she was 43 that her mother had not abandoned her, but that behind her adoption was a darker story. He is one of more than 2,000 victims of a perverse diplomatic campaign by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to improve his international image, which, four decades later, also makes Sweden blush.

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From 1 January 2022, adoptive parents can no longer submit a request to have data from before the adoption removed from the personal list of the adopted child. Only the adopted child (aged 16 or older) can make such a request. This change ensures that the 'pedigree data' of the child (BRP data from before the adoption) can no longer be removed from the BRP by someone else.

It is therefore no longer possible for adoptive parents to have data from before the adoption removed from the personal list of the child. This concerns, among other things:

the (previous) name;

one or both parents;

the nationality and/or historical address details lost during adoption.

Highlights

Across the European Union (EU), hundreds of thousands of children live in residential institutions. Children with disabilities are among the groups of children over-represented in the still existing large institutions in Europe. The impact of institutionalization is severe and can last a lifetime. The EU and its Member States are commited to supporting the transition from institutional to care that is family and community-based, also known as deinstitutionalisation (DI). Supporting this transition requires evidence-based and informed DI policies and enhanced child protection monitoring and evaluation frameworks and data systems.

UNICEF’s Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia (ECARO) has identified the transition from institutional care to family and community-based care (de-institutionalization) as a regional flagship area of intervention. Part of this work focuses on strengthening the measurement of progress towards deinstitutionalisation and of outcomes for children in care and careleavers across Europe. This requires strengthening the evidence on these groups of children to support the EU and Member States in making informed decisions around key policy priorities such as the European Child Guarantee, focused on breaking the cycle of poverty and social exclusion.

In an effort to further understand alternative care data systems in Europe and the statistics that these systems produce, and help governments and the EU make informed decisions, UNICEF and Eurochild jointly carried out the DataCare project to map alternative care data and data systems across the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27) and the United Kingdom (UK). Over 50 experts across Europe collected data and information which was analysed by the research team comprised of UNICEF, Eurochild members and the Eurochild Secretariat.

This was informed by learnings and the ongoing work with Transformative Monitoring for Enhanced Equity (TransMonEE); a research programme initiated and managed by the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre and transferred to UNICEF ECARO in 2007, with the aim of strengthening research-policy work linkages. The database contains over 500 social and economic indicators including indicators on child protection. Data covers the period from 1989 to the present day, with disaggregated data for many indicators available since 2005. The database is updated yearly due to collaboration with national statistical offices in 29 countries (including 11 EU Member States) and other international databases. In recent years, child protection indicators have been reviewed and refined in consultation with TransMonEE members and regional experts.

TAOISEACH MICHEÁL MARTIN has ruled out reopening the redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby homes.

A High Court ruling which found the Commission of Investigation acted unlawfully by denying fair procedure to the survivors prompted calls for the scheme to be reviewed.

In a significant victory for the survivors on 17 December, the State admitted that the women are indeed identifiable in the final report and should have been given a right to reply to the sections relevant to them prior to the report’s publication.

Philomena Lee and Mary Harney are two of eight survivors of the institutions who took issue with the Commission’s final report and overall findings.

The women’s legal action proceeded as two test cases that would set a precedent for any future cases. Today’s settlement also extends to the six other cases.

The aftermath of transnational illegal adoptions: Redressing human rights violations in the intercountry adoption system with instruments of transitional justice

Abstract

A growing movement of illegally adopted individuals request remedies and reparations for the human rights violations that they and their biological families had suffered. This article explores a number of measures that the stakeholders in the receiving countries can use in an effort to repair the human rights violations caused by illegal intercountry adoptions, borrowing ideas from transitional justice. In order to effectively redress the harm inflicted upon victims of illegal adoptions, a policy on remedies should combine instruments of retributive justice, aimed at holding wrongdoers accountable, with measures of restorative justice that focus on the victims’ needs and interests.

Keywords

Illegal intercountry adoptions, receiving countries, transitional justice, human rights violations, remedies and reparations

The Karnal police have arrested a Meerut-based doctor couple for their alleged involvement in the illegal adoption of the son of a migrant woman labourer.

Accused Dr DP Shrivastav and his gynaecologist wife Dr Sashibala were allegedly evading arrest since they were booked by the police on June 15 under Sections 363, 368, 420, 467, 468, 471 and 34 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Sections 80 and 81 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 after an investigation by the women protection officer-cum-child marriage prohibition officer Rajni Gupta.

Police had already arrested a Meerut-based couple who had adopted the boy illegally in September last year. Police had recovered the child from their Chandigarh-based relatives.

As per complaint filed by the victim’s mother Jyoti at Karnal’s Kunjpura police station on February 2, last year, on September 18 the Meerut-based doctor couple had taken her four-day-old son on pretext of providing treatment.

In her complaint Jyoti had alleged that a few months before birth of the child, she had come in contact with the doctor couple. Four days after birth of the baby at Karnal’s KCGMCH, Dr Shrivastav told her that the baby is facing respiratory problems and they will provide him better treatment at their hospital in Meerut, free of cost.

The Karnal police have arrested a doctor couple of Meerut who were allegedly evading arrest in connection with their alleged involvement in the illegal adoption of a child of a migrant woman labourer.

A case under Sections 363, 368, 420, 467, 468, 471 and 34 of the Indian Penal Code and Sections 80

and 81 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 was filed against Dr DP Shrivastav and his wife, Dr Sashibala, a gynaecologist, on June 15.

Now, they have been arrested by the police and sent to judicial custody.

In February, Jyoti, the mother of the child and a resident of Kunjpura, had alleged that the doctor couple had taken her four-day-old son in their care on pretext of treatment on September 18, 2020.

When the Clinton administration passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) in 1997, it intended to drastically reduce the number of children stuck for long periods of time in foster care. One of the safeguards it put in place was a timeline: If a child was in the foster care system for 15 of 22 consecutive months, states would be required to file for termination of parental rights — with an exception made if the child welfare agency provides a "compelling reason" as to why the parent should retain their rights, though a judge would have the power to overturn that appeal.

Courts can terminate parental rights when child welfare agencies present evidence that a parent is not able to care for their child, including because of neglect, abuse, maltreatment and crimes against children. But there are a much broader range of reasons a child ends up in foster care, and critics have long urged lawmakers to re-examine how this timeline places more stress on both parents and children, and in some cases prematurely separates children from their families.

Roughly 1 in 100 children in the U.S. have their parents' rights terminated by age 18, according to an expanded 2019 analysis by Cornell and Rutgers Universities, and Black, brown and Indigenous families, as well as low-income families, disproportionately lose these rights.

"[ASFA] wasn't designed to protect those families. It was designed to be harmful to those families," said Joyce McMillan, a longtime advocate who wants the law repealed. "Look at those kids whose [parents'] rights are terminated. The system doesn't fight for children. The system does not parent," she added, referring to the higher likelihood of negative life outcomes for foster children.

A new House bill introduced in November aims to build in better protections for different marginalized groups in the system, as well as give more time for parents to get their kids back in their care. While some advocates want to remove the timeline altogether, the bill seeks to expand it to at least relieve some of that pressure, they said.

Hundreds of Danish orphans were subjected to examination in a secret experiment supported by the CIA to establish the link between heredity and environment in the development of schizophrenia, a new documentary revealed.

According to "The Search for Myself" released by Radio Denmark, some 311 children from various orphanages were brought to the basement of the City Hospital in the Danish capital of Copenhagen for examinations in the early 1960s.

Through access to documents from those years as well as the old register, a participator of the experiment and current filmmaker Per Wennick was able to find out that the project had links to the CIA. In the first year alone, the project was supported with 3.4 million Danish kroner, corresponding to approximately 4.6 million Danish kroner today. The research project also received $21,000, the equivalent of approximately 1.2 million Danish kroner to date, from the U.S. health agency, the Human Ecology Foundation, which acted on behalf of the CIA, the report said.

The Danish-American research project began in the early 1960s and was focused on the development of schizophrenia. Many of the orphans who were taken to City Hospital were living in nearby areas.

The studies included various association and intelligence tests as well as tests of a physiological and psychological nature. In one of the many tests, the experimental children had to agree or disagree with about 600 different statements. Wennick also discovered that the purpose of the experiments was deliberately hidden from the children.