Someone dims the lights, and an old video clip begins to roll. In a dank room, dozens of children with shaved heads crouch naked in puddles of urine, fight over a bucket of gruel, lie tethered to radiators. One little girl’s leg juts up at a grotesque angle; she uses her hands to scoot across the wet floor. Several kids rock back and forth or hit their heads against the wall.

The footage is not easy to watch, even for those who remember seeing it on television more than two decades ago. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and Eastern Europe’s communist dictatorships were rapidly collapsing. A few months after the execution of Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, in 1989, Western journalists discovered a desperate underworld of abandoned children warehoused in unheated orphanages.

Around 180,000 were estimated to be living this way, and seeing them on ABC’s “20/20” spurred thousands of Americans to rush to save Romania’s forgotten children.

Some of those Americans are sitting here on an October afternoon in 2012, at the Homewood Suites hotel in Davidson, N.C., along with the Romanian children they adopted. Now in their teens and early 20s, these adoptees are too young to remember much of their home country.

But one person in the room remembers.

In this report, Deji Lambo writes on the tortuous journey of a mother of three, Fortune Obhafuoso; her failed plan to make her life better through surrogacy; and other risky episodes that culminated in a policeman allegedly conniving with yet-to-be-identified persons to pay her N185,000 after collecting her newborn against her will

Fortune Obhafuoso, 35, was embittered as she gave an account of how her day-old child was taken from her at a Lagos State police formation where detectives investigating high-profile criminal cases are domiciled.

The mother of three said after the baby was taken, a policeman, Samuel Ukpabio, threatened her never to return for the child.

Afterward, she was conciliated with N15,000 and thrown out.

“All I want is my baby; I gave birth to him around 12.30am on Friday, December 23, 2022, and immediately named him Joseph. I only breastfed him once because, on the same day I gave birth to him, I was arrested and taken alongside my three children to the State Criminal Investigation Department, Panti, Yaba, Lagos State.

Since a few months you can again adopt a child from abroad in the Netherlands. That child will have a promising life here, but what does the adoption actually do to someone's identity? We ask influencer Lara Mallo (34), she was adopted as a baby from Brazil and made the YouTube series Looking for Lara in which she goes in search of where she comes from. “I couldn't find inner peace.”

At the age of one, Lara Mallo (34) from São Paulo was adopted by a Dutch family. She grew up in Het Gooi, where she was bullied as a child because she looked different from her classmates. Although she has actively searched for her biological parents, it has yielded little to this day.

Hey Lara, thank you for sharing your story. When did you find out you were adopted?

“I never really realized I was a different color because I always felt white. Just like my adoptive parents. But at the age of four, classmates already showed that they thought I was 'dirty' because I have a different skin color than them. As a child I didn't understand that. I thought: why am I brown and my parents are white? Then my parents explained to me that they adopted me because my biological parents could not take care of me. They said it honestly and directly, without making a fuss.”

What was it like growing up in your adoptive family?

MUMBAI: Hindus who have always wanted to adopt a girl even though they already have a daughter can now do just

that. The Hindu adoption law prohibits same gender adoptions but, in a landmark judgment this week, the Bombay High

Court has thrown open the legal doors to allow Hindus adopt a child of the same gender as their existing one.

In the verdict, the HC allowed a recent petition by Mumbai-based actor couple (names withheld on request) to be legally

declared as adoptive parents of a girl they had taken in as their ward over four years ago under the Juvenile Justice Act.

Born and abandoned in Mumbai, reborn in Sweden, Erika Sandberg says she is Indian on the outside, but feels Swedish on the inside.

Rediff.com's Vaihayasi Pande Daniel narrates her tale.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com

In August 1976, a Swissair jet flew out of the monsoon skies of Bombay, due west, with a precious little bundle onboard.

The Boeing was headed for Zurich. In Switzerland probably another air hostess took careful charge of this special delivery as she boarded a flight headed to Stockholm.

The Bombay High Court on Tuesday granted interim stay on transfer of pending adoption matters to the District Magistrates and directed the courts to continue with adjudication in such cases.

The division bench of Justice G. S. Patel and Justice S. G. Dige also issued notice to the Attorney General for India in a writ petition challenging the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act 2021 to the extent that the word ‘Court’ is replaced with ‘District Magistrates’.

The court listed the petition for final disposal on February 14, 2023, at 2.30 pm.

“While considering interim relief, we must bear in mind the primary objective which is the interest of the children and infants who are to be adopted whether these are domestic or foreign adoptions. The concerns of the adoptive parents are also involved," the court said.

The court further said that if the petition succeeds, any orders passed by the District Magistrates will immediately become vulnerable.

The court says there is no harm if the existing system of courts handling adoption cases continues till the next day of hearing, February 14, and rejects the argument that the amendment was required to avoid delays in the disposal of the adoption matters.

The Bombay High Court has directed the central and state government not to transfer pending adoption proceedings to district magistrates, as mandated under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act 2021, till the next hearing on a challenge to the Act’s provisions allowing the DMs to issue adoption orders.

The high court said that till the plea is disposed of, the courts currently having such matters on their record and file should continue with the proceedings. “The safer and more prudent course of action would be to allow all the matters to be placed before a single-judge bench of the high court which is assigned to hear such matters… Those orders may continue to be passed until the challenge is finally decided,” it said Tuesday.

The court also stayed the effect and implementation of a September 30, 2022, letter issued by the commissioner of the Women and Child Department asking all courts to transfer adoption cases to district magistrates.

A bench of Justices G S Patel and S G Dige passed the interim order on a writ petition filed by advocates Nisha Pandya and Pradeep Pandya, residents of Kandivli, that challenged the constitutional validity of the 2021 amendment. The petitioners claimed that because of the amendment, which replaced “court” with “District Magistrate”, the adoption procedure would be overseen by the DM, who is an executive officer. The procedure had since 2006 been entrusted to the judiciary, they said, claiming that the amendment was made without any logical reason.

MORE than three weeks have passed since the arrest of eight Croatian citizens, i.e. four married couples in Zambia, allegedly on suspicion of child trafficking. The indictment has not yet been filed, and the key circumstances of the case are still not known to the public.

Based on reports from the local and Zambian media and statements from Croatian institutions, we know that four married couples from Croatia came to Zambia to adopt children from the Congo and that the Zambian police arrested them in the town of Ndoli together with the children, who were handed over to a social welfare institution. .

According to a statement by the Police Chief of the Copperbelt Province, Peacewell Mweemba, a preliminary investigation indicates that the adoption documents issued by Congo "are not authentic", local media reported.

Zambian police said they received a tip-off on December 6 that three white men had booked rooms at a guest house in Ndola, after which immigration officials, with the help of police, tracked down the suspects, who were accompanied by children of Congolese origin between the ages of one and three. They were arrested a day later at Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe International Airport.

The local police announced their identity, which caused great public interest and calls from various right-wing politicians and portals, from the Vice President of the Zagreb City Assembly from the Homeland Movement Igor Peternel to the Narod.hr portal Željka Marki?.

Directing CARA to issue an NOC within 30 days to an NRI couple for adoption

of a child, the Delhi High Court in a ruling said the application being prior to

the coming into force of Adoption Regulations, 2022, the "adoption would not

be strictly required to be dealt with in the procedure prescribed in the said

Regulations."

Croatian adoptive parents arrested in Zambia have proof that the biological mothers gave up their children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jutarnji List daily said on Thursday.

The families of the eight Croatians arrested in Zambia on 7 December on suspicion of child trafficking are waiting to hear if the four couples will be remanded in custody or released on bail. A decision is expected to be made today by a criminal court judge in Ndola, Zambia.

The couples arranged with their lawyers to submit evidence that the children they adopted in the DRC met the requirements for adoption and that their biological mothers gave up parental care, the daily said, adding that the evidence has been gathered.

At a hearing earlier this week, a court-appointed defence attorney requested that the Croatian couples be released on bail, to which the state prosecutor objected, citing flight risk.

A ray of hope that the court could grant bail came from the prosecutor’s claim that in that case, the Croatian nationals must regulate their residence in Zambia for the duration of the trial, Jutarnji List said but added that, according to Zambian journalists, the chances for that are slim.