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?

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