From: Arun Dohle [mailto:arundohle@gmail.com]

Sent: Donnerstag, 30. April 2015 11:22

To: Riccardo.Maggi@ec.europa.eu

Cc: Sophie.ALEXANDROVA@ec.europa.eu

Subject: RE: Request for contribution report - Ms R. Post - by 10 February

---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Roelie Post

Date: Sun, 16 May 2021, 20:30

Subject: Vraag

To:

(Novum) - State Secretary Frans Timmermans (PvdA) will visit the Bulgarian children's home in Mogilino on Friday to see 'the situation with and care for children' with their own eyes. He does this as a result of a British documentary, which was broadcast on Wednesday evening in a shortened version by Netwerk.

January 30, 2008, 9:54 PM

The parentless or disabled children live in a family replacement home. The BBC documentary explains that they live in miserable conditions. Their basic necessities are provided for but they would not receive medical care and therapy. As a result, most children would never have learned to talk.

The documentary also led to great social unrest in Bulgaria. On Monday Timmermans talked about it with his Bulgarian counterpart. Gergana Grancharova said he was shocked by the minister and said he had taken steps to improve the situation in the home in Mogilino. It was also agreed that Timmermans would come to Bulgaria to view the developments.

According to Timmermans, policy in Bulgaria is going 'in the right direction', but there is still a lot to improve in daily practice. The State Secretary wants to continue to support the Bulgarian government in improving Bulgarian youth care. "This is not only about money, but also about knowledge and expertise.

The young Allgäu native did not know her biological mother until now. Now she has visited them in Romania.

Roberta, 23:

I was adopted from an orphanage in Romania. I was two years and three months old then, today I'm 23 and have finished my training as a physiotherapist. My parents told me that the home was very poor. Later they adopted a little boy, who is my brother to me.

I've often wanted to look for the woman who gave birth to me and gave me away. Especially during puberty, I sometimes felt a little strange and didn't belong. And then one day, in 2016, I just did it. I wanted to cross the topic for myself. I had her name and roughly her age. When I saw a woman on Facebook, I knew immediately: That was her. We look alike. I thought it was pretty cool that there are still people who look almost like me. I've never had anyone who looked like me.

I skyped with her. She was pretty nervous, I was just a little bit nervous. Then we planned my trip to Romania, we had discussed that my parents would come with me. They support me a lot in every way.

In the life of adopted Anand Kaper (46), there have always been questions about India, the country where he was born. From the age of eighteen until now, he has visited the country eighteen times. He traveled across the country to meet people, get to know the culture and ultimately to find his family. During the first session of the “Getting to grips with the search landscape” process, Anand shares his knowledge and experience with adoptees who are at the beginning of their search: “I had to do everything surrounding my search alone and I would find it very annoying if others did the same. just have to do.”

Anand is a primary school teacher and co-manager of theinterest groupAn interest group or association is an organization that represents the interests of a specific group. Interest groups in the adoption field, for example, serve adoptees from a certain country. DNA India Adoptees. He lives with his family in Apeldoorn, where he has lived almost all his life. Anand was nine months old when he was adopted from India by his Dutch motheradoptive parentsIn Dutch we use many different words for parents after distance and adoption. Everyone uses their own words for these relationships and gives their own meaning and feelings to these words. This means that two people can use the same word in a different way. INEA used a questionnaire to investigate which words we can best use. As INEA, the expertise center for intercountry adoption, we take this into account. We are aware that every word we ultimately choose can have advantages and disadvantages for everyone personally.. “Together with my wife, who is also adopted from India, I have a twelve-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son,” he says proudly. “For me, the Netherlands feels like home thanks to them, but India now also feels like home. I remember the first time I stepped off the plane in Mumbai, the place where I was born. I felt the warmth, I smelled the scent and thought: 'home'.”

Anand was eighteen when he returned to India for the first time with his adoptive parents: “At home we had a large folder with all the documents and papers related to my adoption. I was always curious about the country I came from. During our first visit to my native country, we mainly came to get to know the country. It was a three-week trip, during which we visited the orphanage in the last five days where I was taken as a six-day-old baby. I have now been to India seventeen times. My wife has been there twice now and I would like to show it to my daughter and son too, but it is a costly undertaking.”

Follow the paper trail

“I always had a great interest in the country of India and I saw a lot during my travels. During my first travels I was not looking for my family. I went from north to south, from east to west, but always ended up in Mumbai. In 2002 my journey was different than usual. Where I normally immersed myself completely in the culture, the people and the country, this time I decided to go to the hospital where I was born on spec. I had found the name of the hospital in my 'large adoption folder'. Without any expectations, I arrived at the hospital, where I told my story to a nurse and a counselor. I was helped kindly and to my surprise there was a birth register that I was allowed to look at. Taking photos was forbidden, so I copied everything by hand. It was a very special discovery, but I decided not to do anything with it.”

The Netherlands, which paused international adoptions in 2021 due to structural abuses, promises to soon reinstate the possibility of adopting from the Philippines, Hungary, Lesotho, Taiwan, Thailand, and South Africa.

Cooperation between the Netherlands and the countries from which adoption will be resumed is intensifying, the government confirmed.

A similar type of cooperation relationship with Bulgaria and Portugal is expected in the first half of 2023 following an investigation by the Central Authority for International Children’s Affairs.

At the same time, the adoption cooperation relationship with the US, China, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Peru, Colombia, Burkina Faso, and Haiti is being phased out.

“Now that it is clear from which countries intercountry adoption will remain possible and which not, information and information meetings will follow and family surveys will be resumed. This will bring an end to an uncertain time for those involved,” said Legal Protection Minister Franc Weerwind

NEWS

A plan to phase out intercountry adoption within five years was scrapped at the last minute, according to research by the Nederlands Dagblad. Tjibbe Joustra, chairman of the committee that investigated abuses in adoption practice, is surprised about this.

A committee led by Tjibbe Joustra conducted more than a year and a half of research into the practice of intercountry adoption. The conclusions that the former top official presented in February 2021 were clear. Serious abuses occurred in all countries surveyed, such as forgery of documents, child trafficking and child theft. Then-Minister Sander Dekker of Legal Protection immediately pulled the emergency brakes and announced a temporary halt to adoption. A year later, his successor Franc Weerwind decided that adoptions could be resumed, but in a new system and from a limited number of countries.

Joustra and his committee were no longer asked for advice when drawing up this new policy. “No, there has been no contact with us,” he responds. 'I thought that was remarkable. If you have done long research into something, you can also ask such a committee for ideas when making decisions. That is of course not necessary, but from an efficiency point of view it is a good course of action.'

text continues below the advertisement

“For too long, intercountry adoption has been seen as a laudable way to save children in need.” That sentence appears almost at the end of the Joustra committee report (February 2021). There are children in need and there are no good solutions in their own country; they are better off in the rich West. Here are - childless - couples who want to receive them lovingly. Adoption is a form of doing good. 'In this way of thinking there was no room for contradictory or unwelcome judgments that could disrupt this picture.'

In fact, it still works that way, as can be seen from the reconstruction in this newspaper on Saturday of the decision-making in the cabinet in April last year. Perhaps there is room for 'unwelcome' judgments; the risk of abuse is discussed. But the consequence is not drawn. Minister Franc Weerwind wanted to stop adopting children from distant countries, with a phase-out period of five years. But when it turned out that his own party D66 wanted to go through with it, he made a U-turn within a day.

Many adopted children are doing well; they wouldn't want their lives to have turned out differently. And many adoptive parents are of good will and provide a loving home. There is no doubt about that. But is continuing with adoption 'in the interests of the child', as D66 claims?

This decade, 48 million children under the age of five will die from 'preventable causes'. 200 million children suffer from malnutrition, almost 160 million are threatened by drought, 160 million children have to work. More than three-quarters of all children under the age of fourteen grow up with abuse or psychological violence. And the UN children's fund Unicef ​​has even more figures. In the Netherlands, several dozen children are adopted from abroad every year. If that is a form of child protection, as advocates say, it bears no relation to what is needed. On the other hand, there is the risk of abuse - 'until now', said Joustra, and you cannot eliminate this, even if you set up one central mediation organization in the Netherlands.

The entire Joustra committee had not been necessary; Ultimately, D66 and in its wake the cabinet listened to interest groups again. The children currently concerned do not yet have a voice. And there is another group that is not heard: their biological parents - to whom the children are first and foremost entrusted, if necessary with help from people and institutions around them and support from the wealthy West.

The Madras High Court has constituted a dedicated special bench comprising Justices N Anand Venkatesh and Sunder Mohan to monitor the implementation of provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the Juvenile Justice Care and Protection Act (JJ Act).

In an order passed on June 16, the division bench accordingly directed the High Court Registry to notify all lawyers' associations both at the Principal seat in Chennai, as well as the Madurai Bench to "enable the Court to take assistance of the Bar, considering the importance of the issue that is going to be dealt with by this Court."

The bench also directed the Director General of Police (DGP), Tamil Nadu, and the DGP of Pondicherry to submit all data on cases under the two Acts pending at the stage of investigation before the police and the cases which are pending before the Court or, the JJ Board, pertaining to thevictims as well as to juveniles in conflict with law.

The bench was constituted following an order to that effect in April this year by the then Acting Chief Justice T Raja.

Lesbian mothers raising families in Italy risk being erased from official records and ordered to change the surnames of their children as Giorgia Meloni’s government continues its crackdown on same-sex families.

A magistrate in the northern city of Padua has sent a court a list of 33 lesbian couples registered as parents at the town hall since 2017 and asked judges to strike from birth records the name of the partner who did not give birth. If that partner’s surname has been taken by her child or children, it must be dropped, Valeria Sanzari, the magistrate, said.

The request, which will be ruled on by a court in November, is Sanzari’s response to an Italian government circular in March that ordered town halls to stop