They are called 'donor children', the approximately 40,000 Dutch children who were born until it was banned in 2004 thanks to anonymous sperm donation. The great secret that is still jealously covered up in many families has almost been overtaken by time. The DNA tests that are accessible to everyone are the big game changer .

Her mother asked her whether she could come to Amsterdam at the end of July 2020. Something had to be discussed. Something that was not suitable for over the telephone. And they had to be four of them: Marilien, her brother, her mother and her father.

That was something that had not happened for thirty years, with 'the whole family' - as it is called - in one room. Whatever had to be told could never be as bad as that, I thought. The four of us in one room, we hadn't done that for a long time. ' Marilien (52) has always been funny, her brother Steven (50) too.

She had a valid excuse: corona, especially if, like Marilien, you work and live with the family in Ireland. A trip to Amsterdam had meant quarantine on her return for two weeks. Could it really not be over the phone? No, it really couldn't be over the phone, said her 83-year-old and very spry mother, but she didn't have to worry either. It was not a disease, no one was going to die for the time being. It had to do with family history. What could this be, Marilien and Steven wondered.

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More than 20 High Court cases in relation to illegal adoptions have been launched and are at “an advanced stage”, it has emerged.

Dublin solicitors Coleman Legal Partners has now issued 14 cases in total, while Navan-based firm Cosgrave Solicitors represents clients in nine other cases.*

Cosgraves secured substantial damages for Tressa Reeves and her son Andre Donnelly in 2018, while Coleman Legal Partners lodged a case last year for Belfast man Patrick FitzSymons, whose parents handed him to the Catholic church agency St Patrick’s Guild in the 1960s, which then arranged for him to be adopted by a couple in Co Antrim. Mr FitzSymons’s case was formally launched in January 2020.

He sought damages for personal and psychological injuries and exemplary damages for “actionable conspiracy, deceit, malicious falsehood and infringement of constitutional rights”, relating to the alleged forgery of birth documents.

St Patrick’s Guild has so far declined to nominate lawyers to defend the case. Norman Spicer of Coleman Legal Partners said his firm has secured a judgment in default of appearance against St Patrick’s Guild in four cases of the 14 so far and more are due before the courts in the coming weeks..

During the last cabinet term, Minister Hugo de Jonge was 'system responsible' for youth care. A headache file, about which he barely informed the House for three years and in which the new decentralized health care system turned out to be indomitable. Silent and inglorious, De Jonge left the portfolio at the end of last year, on which he manifested himself as an alderman in Rotterdam. Youth care is in crisis. 'Thinking that it will all work out on its own, I just don't believe in that anymore.'

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In several European countries, there is currently a lively discussion about international adoptions. The debate started when the Netherlands decided to stop all international adoptions for the time being, the half-finished adoption processes are of course completed.

However, the discussion has been going on for many years. For example, Denmark temporarily stopped international adoptions in 2019, investigating the operability and ethics of the adoption system, until 2020 when international adoptions resumed. Last year, practices in international adoption by third parties were also reviewed in Sweden and the current model was found to work.

The investigations are a result of concerns about the ethics of international adoptions, as individual adoptions have been shown to contain irregularities. The discussion and investigations have been useful. The Swedish Inquiry's final report contains recommendations on, for example, developing services after adoption and Nordic co-operation, and it pays to listen to these recommendations here in Finland as well.

Why does bureaucracy take so much time?

We wish that the ongoing discussion for practice in international adoption a few steps forward again and open up new perspectives. In the public discussion, bureaucracy and the long process of adoptions are often seen as a negative thing. Hopefully we will see a shift from the point of view of the parents and the expectants also to the perspective of the adopted children.

Taoiseach (Irish PM) Micheál Martin has described revelations about illegal adoptions as "shocking".

He said "what happened was wrong" and "completely unacceptable".

RTÉ Investigates has reported that for decades thousands of babies born to unmarried mothers were illegally adopted.

Many only recently found out they were adopted, believing until then that the mother and father they grew up with were their natural parents.

Some also discovered they had been celebrating their birthday on the wrong date for decades, because their birth certificates had been falsified.

ISS Greece, an adoption agency which once catered to thousands of foreigners who wanted to raise Greek children as their own, is now in the process of digitizing their records.

The organization, which once sent many thousands of children abroad during much harder times in Greece, now focuses its efforts on finding children for childless Greek couples.

Grecian Delight supports Greece

But decades of sending babies and young children abroad to live, in the US and other Western nations, are chronicled in their records. And soon that information will be digitized and searchable by those who want to discover their roots.

“Our organization is one of the oldest NGOs in Greece, initially catering to refugees from Asia Minor (Turkey) in the ‘20s,” its director, Despina Oikonomou, explains.

A son of former President and Taoiseach Éamon de Valera facilitated illegal adoptions in the 1950s and 1960s, according to a new documentary.

Professor Éamon de Valera Jr is said to have helped arrange for four children to be illegally adopted into the same house.

Evidence has also emerged showing he arranged antenatal appointments for a woman who was not pregnant.

This allowed her to pretend the child she was illegally adopting was hers.

Prof De Valera is one of three doctors named in a documentary being broadcast tonight who are alleged to have facilitated such adoptions.

The ISS has been hiding in plain sight in the history of private international law since the 1920s. Anyone lucky enough to visit ISS-USA’s archives at the University of Minnesota would be astonished by ISS’s extensive engagement with virtually every aspect of transnational family law. During the first half of the 20th century the ISS left no stone untouched in an effort to devise an international socio-legal framework for cross-border family maintenance claims. It lobbied scholars, consuls, employers, national legislators and international organizations; its global network of social workers worked together to inform women living abroad when their husbands attempted to file divorce proceedings in the U.S.; it experimented with entirely new and imaginative legal arguments to convince U.S. courts to assume jurisdiction over foreign women’s maintenance claims against their husbands living in the U.S.; and it submitted expert evidence to the Child Welfare Committee of the League of Nations.

Unbeknownst to contemporary private international law scholars, the report sent by Ernst Rabel to the League of Nations on cross-border maintenance claims had in fact been commissioned by the ISS and based almost entirely on its case files. The entire project on cross-border maintenance claims was in fact the brainchild of Suzanne Ferriere, ISS’s General Secretary until 1945 and thereafter its assistant director and one of only three women on the International Committee of the Red Cross during WWII.

In the 1930s the ISS was involved in the debates on the nationality of married women at the League of Nations. Unlike other feminist organizations, which were skeptical of the League’s attempt to conceptualize the issue of married women’s nationality as a conflict of laws question, the ISS offered an analysis of its case records precisely to press the League to become more conscious and more precise about the conflict-of-laws dimensions of the issue of married women’s nationality. It continued to press for legal aid for foreign citizens, to help foreigners bring inheritance and property claims either in the U.S. or in their countries of origin and to press U.S. and foreign courts to co-operate with each other in cross-border family law matters.

In between the two World Wars several ISS social workers were responsible for the relocation of Jewish children to the U.S., devising new rules on cross-border guardianship and adoption almost from scratch. After the Second World War ISS personnel collaborated with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in setting up cross-border adoption and guardianship standards for displaced unaccompanied minors. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., ISS members petitioned the US Congress to raise the quota for adopted children and to disallow adoptions by proxy.

Most of the issues the ISS had been working on in the first half of the 20th century belonged to an unchartered private international law territory. With modest funds, ISS branches often engaged in detailed legal research projects. Among many other gems, ISS USA’s archive contains numerous article clippings, extensive correspondence and research inquiries sent to universities, legislators or other social workers in an attempt to piece together private international law concepts and techniques that were unknown even to legal practitioners and scholars at the time.

Standing up for your ideals and doing the right thing against all negative forces, that's how D66 party leader Sigrid Kaag is inspired by the mother superior of a children's home in Bethlehem. That is also the reason that she is adding sister Sophie to the gallery of honor of the Museum for Democracy of De Nieuws BV .

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Whenever a new documentary once again peels back the layers of secrecy, shame and deception that were for decades a defining feature of life in Ireland, the biggest shock is that there is no shock. We all know that this is how things have always been done here: the truth quietly placed in a bottom drawer, terrible deeds waved through with a wink and a nudge. The faces change. The story is the same.

And so while the wrongdoings chronicled in RTÉ Investigates: Ireland’s Illegal Adoptions (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm) are obviously heinous, the documentary ultimately lands with a predictable thud. Of course, religious institutions facilitated illegal adoptions. And yes, obviously, the State was complicit in what was essentially a child-laundering conspiracy on an industrial scale. Have the now grown-up victims received justice? What do you think?

The sheer scale of the scandal documented in Aoife Hegarty’s report is hard to take in over the span of a single sitting. Indeed, if this otherwise peerless film has a flaw, it is that it might have been better served by airing in instalments.

I’ve seen dogs that were purchased and the people selling the dogs being more concerned about how the dog was doing than the nuns were

There’s just too much. One case that stands out is that of Mary Dolan, who describes receiving sensitive information relating to her illegal adoption from a Tusla social worker in a hotel lobby. (In a statement, Tusla said it would “engage with” and “apologise to” the “small number” of people who received news about their birth parents in inappropriate settings.) Later she was told she had a birth sibling, living in the United States. They met over the internet and bonded. A DNA test subsequently revealed the initial information had been incorrect: they were not related at all.