BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - An Argentine couple and a former army officer were convicted on Friday of charges related to the illegal adoption of a political prisoner’s baby during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

In a landmark ruling, the federal criminal court sentenced Osvaldo Rivas to eight years in prison, his wife Maria Cristina Gomez to seven years and retired army Capt. Enrique Berthier to 10 years.

The three were charged with kidnapping and hiding Maria Eugenia Sampallo, and falsifying her birth certificate. Berthier was accused of providing the baby, who was born to a woman held in a political prison, to the couple.

It was not immediately clear on which charges each of the three was convicted.

Sampallo is the first of Argentina’s “children of the disappeared” to take legal action against her adoptive parents. Civil plaintiffs can bring charges in criminal court under the Argentine system.

MUMBAI: A 25-year-old woman, unwed when she gave up her son up for adoption last year, ran into a trafficking ring when she wanted the boy back after she got married to his father. She has been forced to approach courts for custody of her year-old baby, reports Rebecca Samervel.

Julia Fernandez, who 'facilitated' the adoption, was arrested earlier this month with an alleged aide Shabana Sheikh for trying to sell a newborn girl for Rs 4.5 lakh.

The Ulhasnagar woman moved the civil court last week to "recover" her son from a Malad couple who had taken him from Fernandez. In a plea submitted through Edith Dey and Mikhail Dey, the mother sought the court "to direct the DCP, ACP and senior police inspector of Bangur Nagar police station, to assist her in recovering her child from the respondents (adoptive parents) who are living within the jurisdiction of Bangur Nagar police station."

The plea will come up for hearing on August 24. The mother said that due to personal and financial difficulties, she was unable to raise the baby and was advised to approach one Julia Fernandez. The mother said that Julia informed her that she had an NGO and would help look after the baby until things settled down and she was in a state to take back the child. The mother said that Julia facilitated adoption of her baby son and informed her that the adoptive couple was wealthy and would look after him well.

In March this year, the civil court had rejected the plea by the Malad couple to be declared the adoptive parents of the boy. The biological mother had told the court then that her husband and she wanted their son back. However, the mother said she never received custody of her child despite the court's orders. "Despite the rejection of the adoption petition, the respondents did not return the baby and are till date illegally holding the custody of the child," the mother's plea said. The mother said that her husband and she had tried to contact the couple several times, through Julia, however, she kept giving excuses and later began threatening to complain to the police.

Fake Lawyer Case: Madras HC Directs Bar Council To Verify Advocates' Antecedents Before Permitting Them To Hold Posts In Statutory Committees

The Madras High Court has directed the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry to verify the antecedents of lawyers

before they are permitted to hold significant positions in the statutory committees.

The direction was made while dealing with a habeas corpus petition by a mother seeking production of her 17-year-old

adopted son, whereby the Court had come across a 'fake lawyer'.

Woman who facilitated adoption, which was legally rejected, was later arrested for being child trafficker

After news reports on a woman, Julia Fernandez appeared that she was a child trafficker and sold infants, a mother moved a civil court, seeking to get her baby back from a couple with whom Fernandez had facilitated the adoption of the petitioner's infant.

The mother, an Ulhasnagar resident, had purportedly borne the child out of wedlock and had come in contact with Fernandez who convinced her for adoption. She had now married the father of the child.

In her application against the adoptive parents filed before a city civil court, she had sought that they be directed to return her baby. Her plea stated that she was unable to raise the infant due to personal difficulties. And, Fernandez facilitated his adoption to the couple, saying they are wealthy and her son will be well looked after.

Accordingly, she said the couple also filed an adoption petition in court. She said during the adoption proceedings, her husband informed the court that they did not want to go ahead with giving up their son for adoption. Accordingly, in March last year, the court rejected the couple's adoption petition. The mother said that despite that, the couple has not returned the child and are illegally holding his custody.

LOCAL ADOPTIVE MOM CHOSEN AS A 2022 CONGRESSIONAL COALITION ON ADOPTION INSTITUTE (CCAI) ANGELS IN ADOPTION® HONOREE FROM MISSOURI WITH SENATOR BLUNT

Adoptive mom of a sibling pair and author, Marcy Bursac, selected to travel to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC for CCAI’s Angels in Adoption® Leadership Program.

St. Louis, MO – Because of her tremendous work in the adoption, foster care, and the child welfare community, Marcy will be traveling to Washington, DC Sept. 20-21, 2022 to participate in congressional meetings with federal policymakers, receive advocacy training and education training, meet with fellow advocates, and receive recognition at the Angels Celebration. Honorees represent a wide spectrum of individuals involved in child welfare who are making a difference. Since the program’s inception in 1999, more than 2,900 Angels have received this honor.

About the Marcy Bursac

Adoption was Marcy's Plan A. She and her husband adopted a biological sibling pair.

CONVENTION of 7 November 1990

between the Government of Romania and the Government of the French Republic on improving the living conditions of abandoned, orphaned and disabled Romanian children, as well as other humanitarian actions on children

ISSUER

INTERNATIONAL ACT

Published in the OFFICIAL GAZETTE no. 14 of February 6, 1992

U.S. Issues Warning of Obstacles In Adopting Romanian Children

By DAVID BINDER

Published: May 24, 1991

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Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Program

Quick Facts:

Formerly known as the Belgian Congo or Zaire, the Democratic Repulic of Congo (DRC) is located near the Equator. Seventy plus million people inhabit this large county in which Western Europe could fit. It shares borders with Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda , South Sudan, Central African Republic, and the Repbulic of Congo. Rich in resources and with the Congo River running through it, DRC has the potential to become a thriving country able to provide for its citizens. That is not its present reality for millions and civil unrest on the borders, lack of infrastructure and social services, diseases, maternal childbirth deaths, and poverty result in many children becoming orphans.

This is a new program for Journeys of the Heart (JOH). JOH has identified an orphanage in Kinshasa, the capital city, which is well managed, well staffed, and which has taken in several dozen children whose parents are unknown. The orphanage was organized and is managed by an ethical and competent director who was educated and obtained a law degree in Western Europe and who has returned to DRC to help orphans.

The children in this orphanage typically range in age from 0 to 5 years old. The staffing includes a pre-school teacher, a nurse who visits every morning to check on the children’s health, an on-call doctor, and others who assess the children’s development. Occasionally there will be siblings available and on a case by case basis, JOH may consider placing unrelated children at the same time with a family.

BOWIE, MD, October 31, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Peter Harry Pfund with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Pfund retired in 1997 after working in the Office of the Legal Adviser (L) of the U.S. Department of State since 1959, with two assignments abroad. He began in 1959 as one of several attorneys working on the Department publication Whiteman: Digest of International Law. Subsequently he was in the part of L responsible for European and Canadian matters, including US-Canadian boundary waters.

1966 to 1968 Pfund was seconded to the Legal Division of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Thereafter he returned to the part of L counseling the Consular Affairs Bureau, working primarily on extradition to and from the United States. Pfund was posted to the U.S. embassy in Bonn, Germany as its legal adviser from 1973 to 1978, focused mainly on issues concerning the status and security of Berlin, as well as legal issues involving U.S. forces stationed in Germany.

From 1979 until his retirement from L in 1997, Pfund was Assistant Legal Adviser for Private International Law in L, responsible for U.S. participation in the private law unification and harmonization work of four intergovernmental organizations, including the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCOPIL). During that tenure, Pfund headed the U.S delegations to sessions of those organizations and the diplomatic conferences at which the final texts of treaties were negotiated and adopted, including the 1980 U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the 1980 Hague Convention on International (Parental) Child Abduction. The United States subsequently became a party to both Conventions. He was also responsible for U.S. participation in the negotiation and conclusion of the 1993 Hague Convention on the Intercountry Adoption of Children, designed primarily to protect the children involved in such adoptions and their biological parent(s). The United States became a party to the Convention in 2007. Pfund retired from L at 65 in 1997, but continued to work part-time until his final retirement in 2004 in the Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs on the provisions of federal regulations for the implementation of the Intercountry Adoption Convention by the United States.

Pfund is a graduate of Amherst College, cum laude (history), and of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is a member of the D.C. Bar, the American Bar Association (ABA), and the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, was on the Board of International Legal Materials and has been a member of the American Society of International Law. He helped to found the Bonn-based Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristen Vereinigung (German-American Lawyers Association) in 1975 and served on its Board of Directors from 1975 to 1978.. He was given the Secretary of State's Career Achievement Award upon his retirement from L in 1997. The ABA in 1987 awarded Pfund the Leonard J. Theberge Prize for Private International Law. In 2000 the National Council for Adoption conferred on Pfund its Adoption Hall of Fame Award.

'It's a story written in heaven,' says the mom of four

BY LOUISE CHAMBERS TIMEAUGUST 17, 2022

After adopting an orphaned boy who had escaped slavery in Ethiopia, a Tennessee mombegan dreaming of a girl child. Coming across a photo of a 7-year-old orphan in need proved her dream had been a premonition, but after traveling back to Ethiopia to adopt the child, a battle began.

The girl, named Favor, was withheld, and feared at risk of being fostered by a known satanist. Mom-of-four Missy Maxwell Worton, of Franklin, refused to leave Ethiopia without her daughter; bolstered by faith, she eventually succeeded.

“It’s a story written in heaven,” Missy told The Epoch Times. “We saw a need. We went and we rescued Favor from a situation that was going to steal her destiny, possibly her life if she had gotten into this man’s hands.