I was dressed in a clown costume: brightly colored baby-doll dress, bloomers, big shoes, red nose—the works—preparing to run the annual Fourth of July 5k race in Skagway, Alaska. As I stretched at the starting line, playing up to the crowd, my husband strode up, grabbed my arm, and tried to pull me toward a side street. Distressed at his forcefulness, I yanked away, ready to demand he explain himself, when his face seemed to melt.

"Michael died."

His gray complexion and the way he reached for me slammed the reality home. Like in a movie scene, my body crumbled to the ground, and as if in a lucid dream, I hovered above: my body was slumped in the middle of the city's Third Street, smack in the center of the hoop-bottomed dress like a bullseye. The sound that escaped my lips still echoes down that empty street—and in my skull.

In the days and weeks to follow, people expressed their condolences. They placed gentle hands on my forearm and nodded wordlessly or, more often, uttered the phrase "I'm so sorry for your loss." Emails filled my inbox, and messages popped up on social media feeds with broken hearts and sad face emojis.

These sympathetic offerings were welcome, if painful, reminders that I was a mother who'd lost her child. But their kindness marked a clear delineation from the last time I'd grieved the loss of this same child: after I'd relinquished my parental rights 23 years earlier.

Former detainee in polisario jails, Fadel Breika, denounced before the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), in Geneva, the trafficking in human beings prevailing in the camps of Tindouf, under the control of separatist militias, on Algerian territory.

Speaking on Thursday, under the interactive dialogue with the UN rapporteur on human trafficking, as part of the 50th session of theUNHRC, Breika pointed to Algeria’s complicity in Polisario’s human rights violations and illicit trafficking.

The separatist militia “prevents the establishment of any human rights framework that is able to monitor and report on trafficking of human beings,” Breika said, denouncing the assignment of the camps’ management to these separatist factions, which “prevents the establishment of any human rights framework capable of monitoring and accounting for trafficking in human beings in the camps.”

He noted, in this sense, that human trafficking is one of the lucrative activities for separatist militias who use, without scruples, these camps as a business.

“The polisario camps are a sad example of the exploitation of human beings by armed separatist militias.”

PRESIDENT MICHAEL D Higgins has signed into law the legislation to provide adopted people access to their information.

The Birth Information and Tracing Bill 2022 was brought forward by Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman.

It recently passed in both the Dáil and the Seanad and has now been signed into law by the President.

The Bill provides for the release of an adopted person’s birth certificate, baptism cert, birth information, early life information, and medical information, as well as the release of information to a next-of-kin of an adopted person who has since died.

It will also apply to people who were boarded out or were the subject of an illegal birth registration.

Bill entitled an Act to make further and better provision in respect of access by certain persons to information concerning their origins and, for that purpose, to provide for the access by adopted persons and persons who have been the subject of incorrect birth registrations or certain care arrangements to their birth certificates and other information and items relating to them; to provide, where such persons are deceased, for the access in certain circumstances by their children or other next of kin to such information or items; to provide for the making available, by the Adoption Authority of Ireland and the Child and Family Agency, of a service for the tracing of certain persons; to provide for the establishment and maintenance of a register to be known as the Contact Preference Register; to provide for the safeguarding and transfer to the Adoption Authority of Ireland of certain records relating to the birth, adoption and care of certain persons; to amend the Succession Act 1965 to make provision in respect of persons who have been the subject of incorrect birth registrations; to amend the Civil Registration Act 2004 to make additional provision in respect of persons who are the subject of incorrect birth registrations; to amend the National Archives Act 1986; to amend the Adoption Act 2010; and to provide for related matters.

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Thanks to the courage and dedication of our fellow adoptees, new report on “Human Rights Violation in the Past Intercountry Adoption Processes” has been launched. This report is the result of KoRoot's collaborative project with the National Human Rights Commission of Korea and published in Korean for the government officials, members of National Assembly, and stakeholders of adoption system in Korea. You may download the Korean version of the report here. http://www.koroot.org/board/4131/detail

This project has been carried out for the last 7 months(May~December, 2021) with various activities including:

Planning the research(June~November)

Researchers' meetings to categorize human rights violation cases and to form structures of questionnaire. (6 times)

Legal experts' meetings to review the cases' possible legal violations. (6 times)

https://open.overheid.nl/repository/ronl-97920b9b46c6a81438385ede6c7db42d2c9cb07a/1/pdf/Wob-verzoek%20mbt%20Adopties%20uit%20India%20-%20Wob-besluit_%20inventarislijst%20en%20documenten.pdf

Adoption is an act that commits the future of the child, his adoptive family and his birth family. This commitment requires more than good intentions. It must be carefully considered by everyone. Adoption arouses feelings, emotions in perpetual evolution, which deserve to be devoted to them a space of listening and reflection.

Our service ONE Adoption is an organization approved by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation for internal adoption – that is to say the adoption of children who were born or reside in French-speaking Belgium.

ONE Adoption fulfills a support mission in several areas concerning adoption:

support for mothers or birth parents in their reflection and their plan to put their child up for adoption;

support for children placed with a view to their adoption, at the request of the birth parents or the Youth Aid authorities;

The decision came just weeks after a liberal national government took office, replacing the earlier one led by right-wing conservatives.

A top court in Slovenia ruled that bans on same-sex couples getting married and adopting children are unconstitutional and ordered its parliament to amend the law within six months to guarantee they can.

Constitutional Court judges ruled 6-3 on both issues Friday, saying that Slovenia's laws allowing only opposite-sex marriages and adoptions violated a constitutional prohibition against discrimination.

Discrimination against same-sex couples “cannot be justified with the traditional meaning of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, nor with special protection of family,” according to the ruling carried by the Slovenian Press Agency.

The ruling, which the court said has immediate effect, breaks ground for LGBTQ rights in Central and Eastern Europe, where several countries have constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and none before now has allowed couples of the same sex to wed.

The life story of Eva Yoo Ri Brussaard, a Korean adoptee in the Netherlands, is heartbreaking, yet it is sadly familiar.

At age 2, she was abandoned by her biological father and was sent oversea with her blind sister to be adopted by a Dutch couple. The couple got divorced only three years later, her sister was sent to an orphanage, and she stayed with the Dutch mother, only to live in neglect.

“I always dreamt about my (birth) parents and thought that I could have a better life in Korea,” said Brussaard.

Like many adoptees did, she grew up with a feeling of being abandoned. “You feel insecure. You don’t feel connected to the world in some ways,” she said.

Now 42, Brussaard is in Seoul preparing for a legal fight to be recognized as the daughter of her birth father.

The shine of life has been gone since January 2020 with Henk Hoft and his wife. In that month, their three grandchildren were removed from their mother and her then boyfriend by order of the juvenile court and placed with foster families. Grandpa Henk has hardly seen them since. They were together once in the past two and a half years. That was when his wife was in the hospital.

Sitting on a bench in the outskirts of his hometown Lemelerveld, Henk tells his side of the story. A series of events is reviewed. The night he had to spend in jail after the threat was reported by Overijssel Youth Protection. That he contacted his grandson several times without permission from the authorities. And his unvarnished opinion on youth care and the National Expertise Team for Youth Protection. "That's mafia, scum. They are the real criminals. They just take the kids away from us."

The out-of-home placement

"It was chaos, that particular day in January 2020. It started with a phone call from our daughter. She asked if the children could stay with us for a while. No problem, of course that was possible. We have enough time and space. My daughter lived then for a while already eleven high in a small flat in Zwolle. I had often said that that was not a good place for the children to grow up."

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