A couple find the daughter they dreamt of, as a woman goes in search of her past

Antoinette Sinnas brings out the beauty of giving an orphan a ray of hope, an abundance of love and a sense of belonging. Fiona and Dave Anastasi have just adopted Nina from India and given new life to a child who would have otherwise probably spent her days cooped up in a cot in squalid conditions. In so doing, they have also given new meaning to their own life…

Fiona and Dave Anastasi’s road to becoming parents began seven-and-a-half years ago, just after they got married. Having tried to conceive for years, their hopes began to plummet. The next step was to explore the option of IVF.

Having always wanted to adopt a child after having kids of their own, Fiona and Dave decided to pursue the adoption process simultaneously. They hoped both would have a positive outcome one day and were optimistic.

But with every passing treatment and every passing year, the couple’s optimism turned into heartbreak, especially for Fiona. A shadow of bitterness began creeping over her after she underwent four IVF sessions and had multiple miscarriages.

The confirmation is the second to occur in less than a week, bringing the total number of identified children to 132.

DNA tests have confirmed that a man was snatched from his mother as a baby during Argentina’s last military dictatorship and was illegally adopted by a family in a northern province, a human rights group said on Wednesday.

The case, the second announced in less than a week, has increased the total number of successful identifications to 132.

The activist group Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo did not release the latest person’s full name, identifying him only as Juan Jose, 46.

During Argentina’s bloody dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, military officials carried out the systematic theft of babies from political prisoners who were often executed without a trace. The children were then illegally adopted by other military officers or allied families.

By Jennifer Borjes

Senate bill S2492A will grant adopted individuals over age 18 the right to access their previously sealed birth certificates. The bill was approved in June of 2019, signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Nov. of that same year, and has come into effect as of Jan. 15.

Laura Robak, a sophomore attending the College of New Rochelle, was adopted by her mother as a young child. Robak, who was born in Romania, has interacted with her biological family in the past, “I think it’s great. I mean everyone should have the right to know who their parents are. I’m all for it.”

Access to one’s birth certificate will provide adoptees with information on their family’s origins, histories, and medical backgrounds. Prior to the passing of this new law, an adoptee would need to petition in court to have their certificate released and, even then, if their biological parents both refused to sign, would not be granted access. This restriction has been in place since 1936.

When asked what led to his decision, Gov. Cuomo said, “Every person has the right to know where they come from, and this new law grants all New Yorkers the same unrestricted rights to their original birth records.”

Zagreb - On Wednesday, the parliamentary Committee on the Family and Youth presented proposals to improve the law on inter-country adoptions, including a ban on adoptions from countries that are not signatories to the Hague Convention and for an expert body to monitor adoptions.

The Committee held a thematic session in light of the trial of eight Croatian citizens who went to Africa to adopt four children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were arrested in neighbouring Zambia on charges of attempted child trafficking.

Most children are adopted from Colombia, Ukraine, China, India and South Korea, and according to data from 2020, DR Congo is only in 19th place, said Professor Dubravka Hrabar from the Faculty of Law in Zagreb.

The Hague Convention on the protection of children and cooperation in connection with international adoption is a document that lays down standards aimed at preventing child trafficking. However, DR Congo is not a signatory to that document, warned Hrabar.

"We need to react urgently and ban adoptions from 'non-Hague countries'." This requires the coordination of various state bodies. I am concerned that we may be part of a wider chain of child trafficking because I know that there is drug, prostitution and child trafficking," said Hrabar.

What do you do if you decide to come back home after a decade of circumventing the globe, designing and delivering public policies, only to find a society that is much more conservative and less inclined to follow meritocratic principles than the one that you left at the end of the 1990s? If you are a public policy expert and a relentless civic activist alike Diana Topcic-Rosenberg, you join a newly formed liberal party and start a quest to normalise Croatian politics from scratch.

This is, in brief, the story of Topcic-Rosenberg’s entrance into politics that started four years ago, when she joined the Civic Liberal Alliance of Croatia, known better by its abbreviation, GLAS. She came back to her Adriatic homeland after earning a Public Administration Master’s degree from Harvard University and a twenty-year career in the field of international development, with organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and Mercy Corps. But she was not satisfied with what she encountered.

“I think that, over a period of time, women were pushed to the margins of public and political life and there has been an attempt to redefine our role solely as mothers, as family caretakers,” she says. In a way, she has seen her role in politics to be one of the antidotes to these developments. “This is where we, as liberals, and particularly as females, should be going – creating space for women to be equal to men in all aspects of society.”

Topcic-Rosenberg’s own primary cause since she came back to Croatia has been child’s rights, in particular – adoption. She found ADOPTA, the Organization for the Support to Adoption, that grew into a think-tank about adoption with a strong professional and advocacy influence, even outside the country. She created the organization after over 20 years of experience of project management in the humanitarian and public policy sector that brought her to disaster-stricken countries, from the former Yugoslavia to Central America and Africa.

Topcic - Rosenberg

MANGALDAI: A new history regarding legal child adoption has been created in Darrang

district on Friday. It was the day when final adoption order was awarded by the court of

the District Magistrate instead of the court of the District Judge following the Juvenile

Justice (care and protection of children) Amendment Act, 2021 with effect from

September, 2022. The District Magistrate of Darrang Munindra Nath Ngatey awarded the

India does not have adequate safety mechanisms for children who face abuse at home. It’s time to build systems for their protection.

The film Mrs Chatterjee v/s Norway, set to be released on March 17, chronicles the traumatic story of Sagarika Bhattacharya and her ex-husband whose very young children were forcibly taken away by the Norwegian child welfare authorities, the Barnevernet, in 2011 because they believed that the children were being abused. It subsequently became a diplomatic row since the Chatterjees and their children were Indian citizens.

This was not the first — or the last — such intervention by the Norwegian state. Migrant families have especially been under scrutiny because their child-rearing practices (co-sleeping for example) are different from the cultural practices of the country. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Norway had violated the right to respect for privacy and family life, home, and correspondence which is protected under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights because of the forced child removal in multiple cases. The ECHR fined Norway because a child was removed from a Somali family, and put up for adoption.

Child protection rules, such as banning physical punishment for disciplinary infractions, are, in fact, beneficial for children, and in the case of the Bhattacharyas, this was one of the reasons (even if it happened just once) that made the family reunification process more arduous. The film has unsettled many Indian immigrant families in Europe. For example, a social media post in the largest international mother’s group in the Netherlands, Amsterdam Mamas, indicated the worries of several South Asians.

India is home to nearly 440 million children, one of the highest numbers in a single country. Yet, we do not have adequate mechanisms to ensure a safety net for children, should homes turn out to be unsafe. UNICEF argues that figures on violence against children, their exploitation, and abuse are likely to be underestimated because most of these cases are not reported.

FROM Hirokazu Kore-eda, the critically acclaimed director of Shoplifter, comes a powerful crime drama set in South Korea about baby traffickers and the meaning of family.

The film follows Moon So Young (Ji Eun Lee) as she leaves her baby son Woo Sung in a baby box, which is where Korean mothers who cannot cope and who cannot legally put their babies up for adoption can drop off their infants safely.

When she returns the next day to get Woo Sung back she discovers that he has been snatched by two men, the brokers, who plan to sell him off to a rich couple who cannot legally adopt.

So she decides to join Ha Sang Hyun (Song Kang Ho from Parasite) and Dong Soo (Gang Dong Won) on their road trip to ensure her son goes to a good home.

Meanwhile two female police detectives Su-Jin (Bae Doona) and Lee (Lee Joo Young) are on their trail aiming to catch them in the act and racking up the tension.

FROM Hirokazu Kore-eda, the critically acclaimed director of Shoplifter, comes a powerful crime drama set in South Korea about baby traffickers and the meaning of family.

The film follows Moon So Young (Ji Eun Lee) as she leaves her baby son Woo Sung in a baby box, which is where Korean mothers who cannot cope and who cannot legally put their babies up for adoption can drop off their infants safely.

When she returns the next day to get Woo Sung back she discovers that he has been snatched by two men, the brokers, who plan to sell him off to a rich couple who cannot legally adopt.

So she decides to join Ha Sang Hyun (Song Kang Ho from Parasite) and Dong Soo (Gang Dong Won) on their road trip to ensure her son goes to a good home.

Meanwhile two female police detectives Su-Jin (Bae Doona) and Lee (Lee Joo Young) are on their trail aiming to catch them in the act and racking up the tension.

For several weeks, Croatia has been in the middle of an international scandal due to four Croatian couples accused of child trafficking. Among them are the transgender councilor of the Mozemo party, Noah Kraljevi?, who was born as a woman, and Zoran Suboši?, the guitarist of Hladni piva.

The representatives of the government are dancing on eggshells, and the mainstream media mitigates the fact that the couples cheated the legal provisions of both Croatia and the DR Congo in order to satisfy their desire for children, regardless of the best interests of those same children!

Without taking into account the safety and best interests of four traumatized children, the youngest of whom is only 15 months old and the other three are 3 years old, the croatian mainstream media tries to present the participants in illegal adoption as heroes instead of using all their strength to expose the mafia network through which they were these couples ended up 'adopting' children, and the gray areas and loopholes in the law when it comes to international adoptions that this case revealed.

What person or couple could get away with such a scandalous act without being a member of the radical left establishment? None! And rightly so!

What is happening in Croatia is the twilight of investigative and free journalism, and it is over the backs of the youngest! All for the purpose of protecting members and sympathizers of the radical left-wing party MOŽEMO, self-proclaimed defenders of human rights!