Decree of the Minister for Legal Protection of 30 November 2020, no.3114150, establishing a Committee of independent experts on the investigation of domestic distance and adoption (Decree Establishing the Committee of Independent Experts on Domestic Distance and Adoption)

The Minister for Legal Protection,

In view of Section 2, subsection 1, of the Advisory Boards and Committees Remuneration Act;

Decision:

Article 1 Definitions

Fatima walks toward the microphone and stands in front of the judge.

It’s Oct. 30, 2020, and Fatima is in the U.S. District Court in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to testify at the sentencing hearing for Michael and Charlotte Taylor.

They are her parents. Or, they were. Fatima isn’t sure what to call them anymore.

She is 19 years old, and the Taylors raised her as their daughter after adopting her from Nicaragua. This is the story she’s been told since she was 5.

Now, Fatima knows this story is a lie.

Last month, BBC Africa Eye exposed a thriving black-market trade in babies in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Police arrested seven people on trafficking charges in response to the story, but what about the women on the other side of these illegal deals? What drives a mother to sell her child?

BBC

Adama's life was easy when she had her parents, she said. Money was tight, and her options were already narrow, but there was an order to things that made sense. She attended school and cherished it. She had few worries. Then her father died when she was 12, and her mother died a few years later.

"Life became so hard then," she said, in a conversation from her village in rural western Kenya. "I had to drop out of school and fend for myself."

At 22, Adama met a man and got pregnant, but he died three days after their baby daughter was born. Her loneliness deepened. She nursed her baby through an infant sickness until the girl improved, at about 18 months, then a steady income was needed to keep them both alive. So Adama left the baby with her elderly grandmother and headed to Nairobi to find work.

When we travelled to Romania to build an orphanage 30 years ago, none of us could have been

prepared for what we witnessed, writes Anneka Rice

Anneka and Monica McDaid in a therapy room at the orphanage

uring lockdown we’ve been turning in on ourselves. It’s been

quite the thing in TV-land to take a nostalgic look at past shows

JAKARTA - Until a few months ago, Ms Widya Astuti Boerma knew her biological mother only from glimpses of memory.

Some were pleasant: a moment of them both at the sultan's palace in Yogyakarta for example. But others were jarring, including one indelibly etched of the family's house ablaze. And then the final one: her mother's instructions at a Jakarta train station to "be a good girl" and go with a woman she barely knew.

When the health emergency was declared, the Secretariat for International Adoption of Quebec (SAI) suspended all its activities, delaying to an indefinite date the meeting of the adoptive parents with their child. "There are those who thought they would leave in March to pick him up, and now it is December and they have no promise of being able to find this child," testifies Dr Jean-François Chicoine, pediatrician at CHU Sainte-Justine , specialist in international adoption.

“When we have already lost a little time with a child who is proposed to us for adoption, with whom we have not been able to share the first months, even the first years of his life, when a year is added to that, it is extremely trying for the parents ”, shares Dr. Chicoine, who was able to speak with these parents within the framework of virtual meetings organized with the collaboration of the personnel of the clinic of adoption and international health of the CHU Sainte -Justine and the SAI.

Gathered in groups of around twenty people, the parents were able to share their concerns and experiences during virtual sessions lasting 2h30 supervised by Doctor Chicoine and his team.

“When we have already lost a little time with a child who is proposed to us for adoption, with whom we have not been able to share the first months, even the first years of his life, when a year is added to that, it is extremely trying for the parents ”, shares Dr. Chicoine.

“When we have already lost a little time with a child who is proposed to us for adoption, with whom we have not been able to share the first months, even the first years of his life, when a year is added to that, it is extremely trying for the parents ”, shares Dr. Chicoine.

-------- Forwarded message ---------

From: ACT

Date: Sat 12. Dec 2020 at 16:03

Subject: Re: Ares(2020)4528893: Subsidiarity Principle in adoptions in the European Union and externally

To:

Pandemic had impacted vulnerable sections of society, says Commission.

The National Human Rights Commission on Friday said it had issued an advisory to the government on measures to be taken to prevent human trafficking in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown has disproportionately impacted the vulnerable sections of the society,” the NHRC said in the advisory addressed to Union ministries concerned and State governments on Tuesday.

The NHRC said the vulnerable were falling prey to traffickers due to the “limited access to shelters and support structures for life and livelihood”. The Commission added that the Women and Child Development Ministry had reportedly received 27 lakh distress calls from March till August and had intervened in 1.92 lakh cases, of which at least 32,700 were related to trafficking, child marriage, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, forced begging and cyber crimes.

The NHRC recommended setting up of a 24/7 toll-free helpline for real-time reporting, tracking and monitoring of trafficking cases. The advisory also said special surveillance should be started at railway stations, bus depots and airports to trace children without adults. The NHRC recommended quick and up-to-date data sharing between States and districts about rescued and missing persons as well as those arrested in trafficking cases.

The stolen climate crisis babies: US politician jailed for selling children of mothers desperate to escape environmental catastrophe

A former politician has been sentenced to six years for running an illegal adoption racket which took advantage of impoverished women from the Marshall Islands, a low-lying nation in the Pacific Ocean, where more and more citizens are being forced to flee because of the climate crisis.

Paul Petersen, a onetime Republican county assessor who was also an adoption attorney, illegally paid women to come to the US to give up their babies to Americans. Petersen had at least 70 adoptions cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas over three years.

Petersen “manipulated birth mothers into consenting to adoptions they did not fully understand,” said First Assistant United States Attorney Fowlkes of the Western District of Arkansas.

Judge Timothy Brooks, who imposed the sentence from Fayetteville, Arkansas on Tuesday, said that Petersen abused his position as an attorney by misleading or instructing others to lie to courts in adoptions that wouldn’t have been approved had the truth been told to them.

Prayagraj: In an important judgment, the Allahabad high court has held that even if a married Hindu man has estranged wife, i.e., living apart but not divorced, even then he needs prior consent of his alienated wife for adoption of a child under Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act.

Dismissing a writ petition filed by one Bhanu Pratap Singh of Mau district, Justice JJ Munir observed, “The proviso makes it imperative for a Hindu male to secure his wife’s consent to an adoption that he makes, unless she has completely and finally renounced the world, or has ceased to be a Hindu, or has been declared by a court of competent jurisdiction to be of unsound mind.”

The petitioner, Bhanu Pratap Singh, had requested for appointment on compassionate grounds in the forest department of the state after the death of his uncle Rajendra Singh.

According to the petitioner, in the year 2001 he was adopted by his uncle, Rajendra Singh, who had alienated his wife Phulmati and had no child from the marriage. Therefore, he was entitled for job as per the provisions of ‘The Uttar Pradesh Recruitment of Dependants of Government Servants Dying-in-Harness Rules, 1974’ because he was sole heir and dependant of his adopter, who was an employee of the forest department at the time of his death.

Subsequently, on December 17, 2016, the forest department rejected the plea of the petitioner for appointment on compassionate grounds. Hence, this rejection was challenged in the present petition before the high court.