There’s a resounding silence around the world from the majority of adoptive parents when adult intercountry adoptees start to talk about whether our adoptions are illegal or illicit. Why is that? Let’s begin the conversation and unpack it a little.

As an intercountry adoptee, I was purchased through illicit and illegal means and it has taken me years to come to terms with what this means and how I view my adoption. I’m not alone in this journey and because of what I hear and see amongst my community of adoptees, I believe it’s really important for adoptive parents to grapple with what they’ve participated in. This system of child trafficking in intercountry adoption is widespread! It’s not just a Guatemalan, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan or Russian issue – it impacts every country we are adopted to and from, beginning back in the 1950s enmasse, through to current day adoptions. The 1993 Hague Convention came about because of the vast number of illegal and illicit adoptions. The Hague could possibly blind adoptive parents into believing their adoptions cannot be illegal or illicit because they went through the “approved” process and authority. But while a Hague adoption is less likely than a pre-Hague private or expatriate adoption to have illegal and illicit practices within, it is no guarantee because the Hague lacks mechanisms to enforce and safeguard against child trafficking.

To date, most adoptive countries have also not curbed or stopped private and expatriate adoptions that bypass the Hague processes. This means illegal and illicit adoptions are very much still possible and facilitated through a country’s immigration pathways and usually the only role an adoptive country will play in these adoptions, is to assess visa eligibility. This remains a huge failing of adoptive countries who assume a birth country has all the checks and balances in place to prevent illegal and illicit practices within private and expatriate adoptions.

If you aren’t grappling with what you’ve participated in as an adoptive parent, you can be sure your adoptees are, at some point in their lives. More so these days, as the world around us changes and country after country (Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, France) eventually investigates and recognises the wrongs done historically in intercountry adoption. Germany, Denmark and Australia are countries where adoptees are currently pushing for their governments to investigate. Support comes from the UN who last year, issued their joint statement on illegal intercountry adoptions.

It’s important we have these discussions and be truthful with adoptees about illegal and illicit practices that are our adoptions. In ICAV, we grapple with the reality, especially when it comes to searching for our origins and finding out the truth. Here’s a webinar I co-facilitated two years ago on this topic. As you’ll see from the webinar, we are all impacted by these practices – adoptees, adoptive parents, and our original families.

The civil court had in its order said since Ms Ansari was a working woman and a divorcee, she would not be able to give personal attention to the child and that the child ought to be with her biological parents.

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court has said refusing a divorced woman to adopt a child on the ground that she is working and hence would not be able to give personal attention to the child reflects a "mindset of medieval conservative concepts".

The court in its order on Tuesday allowed a 47-year-old woman to adopt her four-year-old niece.

A single bench of Justice Gauri Godse in the order said a single parent is bound to be a working person.

A single parent cannot be held ineligible to be an adoptive parent on the ground that he or she is a working person, it said.

In the pantheon of stories of disappearances, the story of Izabel Lopez Raymundo is that of a collateral victim.

It was June 13, 1982, when the military regime of Efrain Rios Mont surrounded the village of Nebaj, where she lived in Guatemala. The military enforced a scorched earth policy and destroyed everything they saw. They set houses on fire, shot a man who was protesting the fires in front of his house; the son stood in front of his family to protect them and was also shot. The mother was taken to the back of the house with a baby on her back and was shot at close range. The bullet killed the mother, but lodged in the baby's body. A soldier took the baby, under the guise of saving him, and placed him in an orphanage. The baby was then adopted and transferred to Belgium, where he grew up.

The baby, now an adult, is called Lopez. She has a scar on her chest where the bullet entered, "as if to say never forget", Ms Lopez said. It was this scar that allowed his family who stayed behind to identify him.

Ms. Lopez told her story during the recent session of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED). The Committee regularly hears or reads testimonies from families and other survivors of enforced disappearances.

“I testify today in tribute to my family, who were massacred in cold blood, and also in tribute to the victims of war who were made to disappear,” said Ms. Lopez. “These families who have to rebuild themselves and live with the physical and psychological pain caused by the massacres but also the disappearance of their loved ones. I testify in the hope that things will change and that this will not happen again. »

"During the week I spent with him, he was unmanageable," said Thursday at the helm of this forties.

A Frenchwoman was given a 10-month suspended prison sentence for neglecting a minor, we learned on Saturday from the Draguignan prosecutor's office (Var), for having abandoned the child she had come to adopt in Congo .

The criminal court also pronounced against this forties, social worker in an educational action service in an open environment, a ban on exercising a professional activity in contact with minors, thus depriving her of her job.

In 2018, after having followed all the steps allowing the adoption of an orphan, now eight years old, who was welcomed in an orphanage in Brazzaville, this woman from Fréjus (south-eastern France) finally had decided, during his first visit to the child, not to adopt him. "During the week that I spent with him, he was unmanageable," said Thursday at the bar this forties, according to comments reported by the regional daily Var-Matin and confirmed to AFP by one of the parties' lawyers. civil.

Child safety guaranteed

Despite the Zambia affair, according to 24sata, one child from DR Congo was adopted and brought to Croatia after the eight were arrested at the beginning of December last year in Zambia.

After eight Croatian citizens ended up in a Zambian prison on suspicion of child trafficking from DR Congo, a woman from central Croatia managed to adopt a child from that country, from the same orphanage, and bring him to Croatia, 24 Hour has learned .

"The woman adopted a child from the same orphanage as the arrested Croats, and the adoption process was identical. The girl she adopted received all Croatian documents," people familiar with the case told 24sata, Telegram reports .

They said that when she saw what happened to the Croats in Zambia, she decided to go directly to DR Congo to get the child. According to the interlocutors involved in the case, the woman gave an African woman a power of attorney to bring her a child from an orphanage. "She went to DR Congo alone to meet her and the child. The African woman in question, who has a company in Croatia, and who had a power of attorney, came to pick her up at the airport in DR Congo," they say.

Then the two of them brought the girl to Croatia. 24sata states that seven more children with Croatian documents are waiting to go to Croatia in the same orphanage.

The Zambia affair exposed numerous illogicalities and difficulties with child adoptions, not only in international adoptions, but also in adoptions in Croatia. Although it was not talked about until now, Jelena Velja?a's melodramatic article in Jutarnji list reopened the issue of adoption of siblings, which apparently in some cases was already taking place contrary to the recommendations of the Ministry of Labour, Pension System, Family and Social Policy. We bring several stories about the adoption of brothers and sisters from Africa, who ended up in different families in Croatia.

The case of Azra Imamovi? Suboši? from the Zambia affair

"Azra was ecstatic when they told her that they had informed her that two girls, sisters and a brother, were ready for adoption in the orphanage. She tried for months to find adoptive parents for her daughter's brother and sister and she succeeded. Now, of course, that has been stopped", it was learned a few days ago in an article by Jelena Velja?a for Jutarnji list. We are talking about Azra Imamovi? Suboši?, known from the Zambia affair, in which eight Croats were accused of human trafficking.

>Austrian media: 'The child trafficking scandal shakes Croatia, officials part of a criminal network?'

"Azra heard about the possibility of adopting children from DR Congo from a friend who has a friend who adopted a child that way. Azra mediated the arrangements for the adoption of children from the DR Congo - namely, she also found adopters for the sister and brother of the girl she was going to adopt," Utikate announced on Twitter.

The top court on October 1, 2021 had issued notices to the Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Women & Child Development while seeking their responses on the PIL, which said Section 5(4) of the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 was discriminatory and arbitrary.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court agreed to hear on April 28 a plea challenging the Constitutional validity of a provision of the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 which states that a woman who legally adopts a child below the age of three months would be entitled to maternity leave.

The petition submitted that the purported 12 weeks of maternity benefit to adoptive mothers is not only a "mere lip service but when juxtaposed with the maternity benefit of 26 weeks provided to biological mothers, fails to stand even the basic scrutiny of Part III of the Constitution which is wedded to the concept of non-arbitrariness."

A bench of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices PS Narasimha and JB Pardiwala took note of the submissions of a lawyer who mentioned the matter seeking urgent hearing.

The top court on October 1, 2021 had issued notices to the Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Women & Child Development while seeking their responses on the PIL, which said Section 5(4) of the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 was discriminatory and arbitrary.

An archbishop has challenged government agencies to prove their allegation that a Catholic orphanage in his southern Indian archdiocese is involved in child trafficking.

Archbishop Marampudi Joji of Hyderabad challenged "government officials or any responsible person" April 28 to inspect Tender Loving Care (TLC) home after police in Andhra Pradesh state accused it of adoption irregularities.

The archbishop, considered the head of the Catholic Church in Andhra Pradesh, denied that the nuns who run Church-approved and government-sanctioned TLC are involved in illegal procurement of children for adoption. He has appealed to state Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu on the matter.

In raids over 10 days from April 21, state Child Welfare Department officials "rescued" 187 children from eight adoption homes and other places.

In the first raid, the department found 65 children abandoned in a private adoption center.

A court finds: The city of Duisburg should never have taken her little Lara away from Janine S. But the girl has been living with foster parents for years. What now?

There is an elementary school directly opposite the orange apartment building in the south of Duisburg where Janine S. lives. Red clinker bricks, handicrafts on the windows, children's noise during the breaks. If her daughter were still with her, she could start school there next year, simply run across the street home after class and call out: "Mom, I'm back!"

But in all likelihood Lara, whose real name is different, will go to another school in another city, accompanied by other parents, her foster parents, the people she has been living with for five years.

Janine S. often looks over in the direction of the school. "It hurts me," she says. She often shed tears. It's a look at a parental life that hasn't been lived. "I missed everything. All the milestones: learning to walk. Speaking. Riding a bike. The youth welfare office stole my time with my daughter." An accusation that her lawyer Lukas Hugl will repeat in an interview with ZEIT: "This is the confiscation of a minor by the youth welfare office in Duisburg."

And indeed: In January 2023, almost five years after the youth welfare office ordered Lara to be taken into care, the Düsseldorf Administrative Court also decided that it was illegal. A representative of the youth welfare office recognizes this in court. On paper, Janine S. got it right. Indisputable, certified with an official stamp. The decision lies in front of her, protected in transparent film. The only problem is: It is unclear whether this will be of any use to her.

Twenty-three years ago, former President Bill Clinton signed the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, following the Senate's ratification of the international treaty on adoption, the Hague Convention on Adoption. After this bill was signed into law, regulations were promulgated, adoption agencies were accredited, and the U.S. Department of State began their role as the designated "central authority" partnering with the Department of Justice's Immigration and Naturalization Services (now transitioned to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) as required by the new law. Prior to the United States joining the Hague Convention, international adoption was regulated by a patchwork of state laws, immigration regulations, and foreign countries' policies. By formalizing federal oversight, Congress hoped to create stronger partnerships with other countries to reduce corruption and enhance services to children in need of families. Though well-intentioned, the goal of helping more orphaned children find permanent families did not materialize. Instead, the total number of international adoptions fell from over 20,000 in 2004 to less than 2,000 today and the intercountry adoption process has become significantly longer and more expensive.

Other countries also experienced a decline in intercountry adoptions, though with the U.S. receiving about half of all intercountry adoptions globally, the decline in our country has an oversized impact on orphaned children. There remain hundreds of thousands of children around the world in need of a family—and many thousands of qualified parents in the U.S. and other countries who are willing to adopt them—yet bureaucratic policies delay or prevent this from happening. These delays also impact relative adoptions. For U.S. citizens who want to adopt their niece, nephew, or grandchild in another country following the death of the child's parents, the process that used to take weeks or months now often takes many years and costs exponentially more.

Congress should act now to form a robust intercountry adoption program that provides technical assistance to other countries to help them increase the number of children finding permanent families, through a process that is not marred by corruption or coercion. The role of overseeing intercountry adoption is not easy. Only children who cannot be reunified with their families or placed for adoption in their own country should be considered for an international placement. Ensuring that adoptions happen in an ethical and appropriate manner is especially challenging when partnering with countries that have fewer resources and less developed legal and social infrastructure. Yet, it is precisely these countries that often have the most acute need for child welfare services. Our past inability to form effective bilateral partnerships with other countries resulted in thousands of children who could have been with families, but instead spent their childhood in orphanages. It is time to acknowledge that what we have been doing for the past 23 years should not continue. The problems within our current system will not solve themselves.

It is time for Congress to convene child welfare and immigration experts and work toward retooling the current intercountry adoption system. Their goal should be to find effective solutions to shorten processing times, lower cost, and provide opportunities for more children to find permanent families. Necessary changes include allowing adoption cases to be afforded prioritization amid immigration cases, so adoption cases no longer take years to process, as is now often the case. It will also mean the creation of meaningful bilateral engagement with other countries. In recommitting to forming a new, functional intercountry adoption system, we can concurrently find ways to partner and support other countries to increase their own local and domestic adoptions, and to facilitate and enhance family preservation and reunification services. It is normal for Congress to review and revise legislation after reviewing the full scope of implementation and learning what has worked well and what has not. After 23 years, it is past time for Congress to set intercountry adoption on a new path forward.

The Honorable Mary L. Landrieu served as U.S. senator from Louisiana from 1997 to 2015, where she was the original co-sponsor of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 and co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Adoption.