A division bench of the high court gave bail to Chanda and Deepak Kochhar, arrested last month for a loan fraud case filed in 2019, on the ground that not disclosing true and correct facts cannot be the reason for one’s arrest.

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IN a significant decision, the Bombay High Court on Monday declared the arrest of Chanda Kochhar, former ICICI bank managing director and chief executive officer, and her husband, businessman Deepak Kochhar, illegal, holding that their non-disclosure of true and correct facts cannot be a reason for their arrest inasmuch as the right against self-incrimination is provided for in Article 20(3) of the Constitution.

The duo were arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (‘CBI’) last month in lieu of a first information report (‘FIR’) registered against them in 2019 in a case linked to alleged irregularities in a Rs. 3,000-crore loan provided to the Videocon Group when Chanda Kochhar was heading the private sector bank. Both are facing charges under Sections 120B and 420 of the Indian Penal Code, and Sections 7 and 13(2) read with 13(1)(d) (this latter provision was removed by a legislative amendment in 2018) of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

A division bench of Justices Revati Mohite Dere and Prithviraj K. Chavan found the arrest of the duo not in accordance with the law as there was non-compliance with the mandate of Sections 41(1)(b)(ii), 41A and 60A of the Code of Criminal Procedure Code (‘CrPC’).

More than a year after German authorities separated an Indian toddler from her parents, India continues to make efforts to reunite the family. Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra said on Saturday the Indian embassy remained in touch with the family and German authorities to find a way forward. Earlier in December, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had conveyed concerns over the baby to his German counterpart.

German authorities had taken custody of Ariha Shah more than a year ago, alleging that she was being harassed by her parents. Since then, the toddler has been living in foster care in Berlin. The family members of the child - reportedly over one-and-half-years old - have been seeking her repatriation to India.

With the case nearing the two year mark, family members and volunteers have also started several petitions to ‘save Ariha’. Family members have also led protests in front of the German Embassy building in New Delhi.

“The paternal grandmother injured the baby by accident in September 2021. When the parents took her to hospital, they were accused of sexual assault and the baby was removed," contends one Change.org petition.

Earlier reports quoting the parents indicate that the case was eventually closed without charges. However, their daughter was not returned. The Berlin Child Services have also filed a civil custody case for the termination of parental rights. A trial date is yet to be set.

The case of four Croatian couples arrested in Zambia on suspicion of human trafficking through child adoptions from the Democratic Republic of the Congo has attracted the attention of European institutions, the Croatian Vecernji List daily reported on Monday.

The four married couples from Croatia were arrested at Ndola airport in Zambia in early December on suspicion of human trafficking, based on suspicious adoption documents issued in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were released on bail after a court hearing last Thursday.

A statement by the European Commission on cross-border adoptions and the need for greater transparency and closer international cooperation in such cases has been included on the agenda of the plenary session of the European Parliament for February. Discussion was initiated by Croatian MEP Ladislav Ilcic, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, who proposed adoption of a resolution on inter-country adoption.

“Adopting a child is a noble act, but in order to protect children and adoptive parents, we need to put an end to organised crime and patch up the gaps in the system that are used by criminals for child trafficking. That’s why I initiated this resolution, which has quickly received great support from MPs and leaders of political groups,” Ilcic told Vecernji List.

The resolution would call on EU member states to temporarily or permanently suspend child adoptions from DR Congo and other countries with the widespread practice of child trafficking until mechanisms have been established to prevent such practice and potential adoptive parents are provided with an efficient and verified adoption procedure.

PUNE: The state Woman and Child Development (WCD) department has reached out to Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) for information on at least 15 adoption cases cleared by district magistrates (DMs) on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Bombay high court on Tuesday had stayed the implementation of the September 2022 notification that authorised district magistrates to oversee and decide about adoption cases. It directed that henceforth only a single-judge high court bench can hear adoption matters.

“Nearly 10 to 15 cases were cleared in two days by the magistrates in the state when the high court stayed the notification. In these cases, the adoptee parents and children may face legal issues in future and hence we have sought directions from CARA,” a senior WCD official told TOI on Thursday.

Eight cases were cleared by the district magistrate from Nagpur followed by the others, the official from the WCD department said.

The interim order also restrained the Centre and the adoption group of Maharashtra State Women’s Council from transferring any pending cases to district magistrates.

Sirianna Arathi was left out of an important family meeting, one where a couple of her friends, their parents and partners decided she was part of their family – even though she isn't blood related.

"I feel so confident in just being like 'this is my family, these are my sisters, this is my older sister, this is my older brother,'" says Arathi, who takes pride in "owning that kind of chosen family identity without having to put that label of chosen family."

Arathi is originally from south India, but was adopted by a white family in the United States as a child.

She says her adoptive family expected her to be grateful for being "saved" and tried to control her by overmedicating her. She also said another family member abused her.

"I had this view of family that I should be not only completely loyal to the family that raised me, but that was it. That was family," she says.

A ZDF report on Ukrainian children deported to Russia brought it to light. President Putin's child protection officer used an SOS Children's Village facility for propaganda images. The child protection organization rejects the suspicion of involvement and relies on clarification. Finding the truth is not easy.

"It hit us like a bang," says Boris Breyer, spokesman for the international aid organization SOS Children's Villages worldwide. He refers to a ten-minute ZDF "Frontal" report from the previous week, which deals with Russian child deportations from Ukraine. You can see Ukrainian children being visited by a good-humoured blonde lady – Maria Lvova-Belova, a woman close to President Vladimir Putin. The scene of the incident is an SOS Children's Village in Tomilino, Russia, near Moscow.

Ukrainian children turned up in Russian SOS Children's Village facilities

The 38-year-old Lvova-Belova, a member of the presidential party United Russia and Putin's "ombudswoman for children's rights", is - according to the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" in November of the previous year - the "architect of the repopulation" of Ukrainian boys and girls to Russia. According to the UN, at least 1,800 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia since the start of Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities speak of a multiple of that – 14,000 children.

In November 2022, the SOS umbrella organization learned that 13 Ukrainian children had been assigned to two SOS Children's Villages Russia facilities by the Russian authorities. "We immediately made that transparent on our website," says Breyer in an interview with the editorial network Germany (RND), "above all to ensure that the public knows about these cases and that these children cannot suddenly disappear somewhere". The 13 boys and girls are still housed there to this day, and there have not been any other Ukrainian additions to the Russian SOS Children's Village facilities. "As far as we know."

Tahiti, October 20, 2021 – After the acquittal at first instance and then on appeal of a man prosecuted for having falsified an acknowledgment of paternity with a view to adopting a little girl, the family affairs judge of Papeete canceled this recognition on September 13 on the grounds that the person concerned had wanted to "escape the usual procedures for adoption" . His lawyer appealed this decision. The child remains placed in the nursery.

New twist in the case of attempted adoption outside of any legal framework which had hit the headlines in 2020 before leading, last March, to the release of two couples before the Papeete Court of Appeal. The former was then accused of having adopted the granddaughter of the latter, through a false acknowledgment of paternity. If the criminal court and then the court of appeal had considered that no offense had been committed by the defendants, the family affairs judge of Papeete nevertheless canceled on September 13 the recognition of paternity made by one of the two "adoptive" fathers.

Taking care to recall in its decision that the Papeete Court of Appeal had confirmed the acquittal of the proceedings for "forgery and use of forgery" - because the fraudulent recognition of a child did not exactly constitute a "forgery" in terms of criminal – the family affairs judge believes that it is different on the civil level. In the judgment, she affirms that the adoptive father who had recognized the child at birth "wanted to escape the usual procedures in matters of adoption or more locally of delegation of parental authority, which in addition to the search for the persistence of the agreement of the two biological parents, is also subject to the control of the family affairs judge who must The magistrate therefore notes that "paternal recognition of the child necessarily defeated this control and also deprived the biological parents of retracting in the aftermath of the birth" of the little girl and that, therefore, this recognition had indeed been "made in fraud of law".

The "adoptive" father appeals

In support of this analysis, the family court judge therefore canceled the recognition of paternity made by one of the adoptive fathers. But the case is not yet over, since the latter's lawyer has appealed the decision of the family court judge and a hearing will be held in November before the Court of Appeal. On the criminal level, the public prosecutor's office appealed to the Court of Cassation to challenge the acquittal, but the Parisian court has not yet rendered its decision. The little girl, who has just turned one, remains placed in the nursery.

Abii was adopted from Zimbabwe by Australian parents when she was a baby. She always wanted to know where she came from - but the answer was wilder than she imagined.

Early one morning in August 1983, lives are about to change forever. A baby was dumped in a gutter outside a Zimbabwe hospital, wrapped in a towel.

That tiny, abandoned baby would one day become Australian - a true blue Aussie. But who left her in a lonely stretch of African wasteland - and why - has remained a mystery for 36 years.

36 years have passed since that little girl was found dumped by an African roadside.

The young baby, Abigail Prangs, is now a happily married mother of four living on the Sunshine Coast.

When she was only five years old, Isabelina Pinto was taken from her family by an Indonesian soldier. She was one of thousands of children taken to Indonesia during its brutal 30-year occupation of East Timor. Decades later she found her family and now works to reunite others. The BBC's Rebecca Henschke tells her story.

She remembers clearly the day an Indonesian soldier visited her family in their village in Viqueque.

It was a Sunday after church, the time of day when Christian soldiers tried to get close to the ordinary residents of Catholic-majority East Timor.

"The soldier said 'if we don't take this child, we can kill you all'. He wanted a daughter, he didn't have one," Isabelina recalls.

It didn't take long for her to realise she was being taken away from home.

KHANDWA, India (AP) - Editor’s note: Four years before the movie “Lion” was released, two Associated Press reporters told the story of Saroo Brierley’s complicated reunion with his mother, Fatima Munshi. This is that story, which was originally published by the AP in 2012:

Saroo’s eyes snapped open and everything was suddenly, horribly, wrong.

The 5-year-old’s tiny body was still curled up on the hard wooden seat of the Indian train, just as it was when he’d drifted off to sleep. The rattle of the train was loud and steady, just as it always was when he rode home with his big brother, Guddu.

But Guddu was not there. And the alien landscape flashing past the window looked nothing like home.

?Saroo’s heart began to pound. The train car was empty. His brother should have been there, sweeping under the seats for loose change. Where was Guddu?