Chile has legalised a landmark law granting equal marriage rights to same-sex couples, in a momentous victory for gay rights activists in an historically Catholic country.

The legislation was passed by overwhelming majorities in both chambers of the parliament on Tuesday to approve a marriage equality bill that also includes legalisation for adoptions by same-sex couples.

With this Chile has become the 31st nation in Latin America and sixth in South America to allow same-sex marriage.

On Tuesday, the bill was approved by the Senate with 82 votes in favour and 20 in against with two abstentions. Following the landmark vote, several deputies in the Chamber hugged, including some from opposing parties.

The equal marriage bill has stalled in Congress for four years after first presented by left-leaning president Michelle Bachelet and remained neglected until it was given urgent status by President Sebastián Piñera. Mr Piñera’s support came as a surprise to everyone as he had long argued that marriage is a union between a man and a woman.The law will allow gay couples with parental rights, which was until now prohibited under the Civil Union act.

Anupama S Chandran’s newborn child was sent away by her parents, who were unhappy that his father was from the Dalit caste

Through the rains and steamy heat of November, day and night, Anupama S Chandran sat by the gates of the Kerala state secretariat. She refused to eat, drink or be moved. Her single demand was written on a placard: “Give me my baby.”

The story of Chandran’s fight to get back her child, who was snatched from her by her own family days after he was born and put up for adoption without her knowledge, is one that has been greeted with both horror and a sad familiarity in India.

In a society that remains split by the fault lines of caste, Chandran’s ordeal exposed the cruelties still inflicted upon women who dare to cross those lines.

Chandran, the daughter of a local leader from the Communist party of India, was a 19-year-old student when she fell for Ajith Kumar. Each was involved in leftwing political activism. He was 10 years older and previously married, but it was a friendship that gradually grew closer until they realised they had fallen in love.

The thousands of Greek orphans who were taken abroad from 1821 through the 1960’s were the topic of a recent seminar hosted by the Eastern Mediterranean Business Culture Alliance (EMBCA), which brought together experts from around the world to discuss the triumphs and tragedies of the past.

Tens of thousands of ethnically-Greek orphans — or, more often, children who were simply without fathers, due to war or other causes — were taken abroad to be adopted or put into orphanages in Turkey and Greece after the war killed so many family breadwinners and disrupted normal life in the country.

But it wasn’t only the War; it was the Ottoman Turks’ genocide of the Greeks that happened afterward, during the 30 year period from 1894-1924, that caused so many Greek children to be spirited away to other lands, most of them never to return. Much later, during the Cold War, Americans and Europeans also adopted thousands of Greek youngsters — many of them becoming completely assimilated at such a young age that they had no connection to their roots whatsoever.

Greek Orphans Event

The panel was moderated by Lou Katsos, the president of the EMBCA. Dr. Gonda Van Steen, the Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College; Historian and Author Dr. Constantine Hatzidimitriou, and Dr. Theodosios Kyriakidis, the Chair of Pontic Studies in the School of History and Archaeology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki were the presenters.

http://www.cna.gob.gt/Documentos/EstadoHogares.pdf

For more than 50 years, enormous resources have been invested in finding and transporting adopted children to Sweden. It is beyond any doubt that irregularities have occurred.

To spend time and work on ensuring that the 60,000 individuals brought to Sweden have access to their fundamental rights is, on the other hand, considered unrealistic, write representatives of the Transnationally Adopted National Organization.

DEBATE. On Thursday 27 October at 08.00, a press conference was held where Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren announced that a state inquiry would be appointed to "investigate the existence of any irregularities in relation to the countries of origin from which most adoptions to Sweden took place and the countries of origin where there are strong suspicions of that there have been irregularities ”. The investigation will last for two years, and aims in addition to the investigation of irregularities to clarify what responsibility different actors have had.

Put beyond all doubt

Hallengren's statement will be another disappointment for those who have hoped for redress. Over the past year, parents from several countries have testified in news reports as well as documentaries and police investigations that their children have been stolen from them, or that they have been pressured in various ways to leave their children. It is not about "possible irregularities". It is beyond any doubt that irregularities have occurred.

As Le Vif revealed in June 2020, five Métis women had sued the Belgian state for crimes against humanity. Born to Belgian fathers and Congolese mothers, they had been placed in an orphanage. The trial began last October, and the Brussels civil court has just dismissed them.

The Brussels civil court ruled, in a judgment handed down on Wednesday, that the segregation of mixed race children in the Congo was not incriminated as a crime against humanity during the period when Belgium was in charge of this African country. . He thus declared unfounded the action of five women who were victims of this system set up by the Belgian authorities in the Congo.

Five women, born in the Congo between 1946 and 1950, had filed a complaint against the Belgian state for crimes against humanity and had brought a civil liability action before the civil court in Brussels.

Read also: They assign the Belgian state for crimes against humanity: "We were abandoned there" (testimonies)

Five women, born in the Congo between 1946 and 1950, had filed a complaint against the Belgian state for crimes against humanity and had brought a civil liability action before the civil court in Brussels. They claimed damages for the significant damage caused, but also the production of archives concerning their origins and their history.

In the Netherlands, fertility clinics guarantee that a sperm donor will donate to a maximum of twelve women. Yet a handful of men manage to produce hundreds of children worldwide with their semen. For these 'super spreaders', sperm donation is a lifestyle. Although clinics unofficially maintain a blacklist, they do not hinder these mass donors. "They were thrilled with every healthy donor."

In 2017 Anneke will receive an unexpected phone call: the doctor who had helped her conceive through a donor eight years earlier is on the line. The doctor tells her that her donor is Jonathan, who is in the news at the time because he had produced as many as 102 children through sperm donations to Dutch clinics.

At the time, her practitioners assured Anneke that a maximum of 25 children would be born with the sperm from her donor. But Jonathan's claim that he didn't donate anywhere else turned out to be false. Jonathan had visited almost all Dutch clinics.

Jonathan is now on an unofficial blacklist of fertility clinics. He is one of a handful of men who deliberately cross legal boundaries and have produced (much) more children than the law allows. The blacklist is unofficial, because under applicable privacy laws, clinics are not allowed to exchange information about their donors, but it was born out of necessity.

A preventive system to thwart 'serial sperm donors' has still not been set up. To this day, Dutch clinics only ask a sperm donor to sign a statement stating that he has not previously donated to another clinic and will not do so. Jonathan has signed at all clinics.

SURVEY "The channels of international adoption" (1/3). Over the past sixty years, hundreds of thousands of children from Latin America, Asia and Africa have been adopted by European or North American couples, sometimes in violation of the law. As adults, some seek the truth about their story. First part of our investigation: between Guatemala and France.

On the walls of the office, dozens of photos tarnished by time. People smile at each other, kiss each other. “This is the first reunion that we have organized, a dad with his daughter… In 2001.” Marco Garavito is still moved by these images, the fruit of more than two decades of labor. The 70-year-old man is responsible for Todos por el reencuentro (“All for the reunion”), one of the programs of the Guatemalan League of Mental Health, a psychological support organization specializing in the search for 5,000 children missing during the long armed conflict between the military and the Marxist guerrillas (200,000 dead between 1960 and 1996).

Marco Garavito shows us around the little house, built around a patio filled with plants, in the center of the capital, Guatemala. Four people work with self-sacrifice within this program, without any help from the State, paying out of their own pockets for translators of the twenty-two Mayan languages, covering kilometers of bumpy tracks to reach remote villages. “We currently have 1,300 cases,” explains our host. At the beginning, we were looking for the children in Guatemala; then it was necessary to expand abroad. Two hundred of them would be in Europe, especially in France, Belgium and Italy. "

Around 71

children, mostly malnourished and

suffering from skin infections, were

recovered last month from the shelter

home of Dr Ketan Soni, the alleged

Family and friends are ecstatic, the reactions on social media are sometimes frightening. Ryan Ramharak (29), trans and non-binary, is pregnant with his partner David (31). “I hope the people after us are treated better.”

David initially had no desire to have children. "When I came out, I thought that having children would be complicated." He himself was adopted from Brazil. “I am very happy with my adoption and my parents, but I don't want to be a father that way. It can be very complicated not to know who your biological parents are. I had written off becoming a father for myself. I'll be a nice uncle, I always thought.”

Ryan went on testosterone for a long time, which gave him beard growth, a lower voice and an angular face, but kept the uterus

Everything changed when he met Ryan over three years ago, through Tinder. He had transitioned at the age of 23. Ryan: ,,My sister had her first child at a time when I had to think about my own fertility. In the hospital I held her baby – super special, of course. Then I found out that I did want children. I wanted to grow up, not a mother.”

Ryan went on testosterone for a long time, which gave him beard growth, a lower voice and an angular face, but kept the uterus. Which for David meant that he might still be able to become a father through a biological route. And Ryan also saw it, he temporarily stopped with hormones.