Thiruvananthapuram: A mother who left her girl child at the ‘ammathottil’, the electronic

cradle Kerala State Council for Child Welfare (KSCCW) in which a child could be placed

anonymously, retrieved the baby after seeing an advertisement regarding the adoption

mother approached the committee after recognising her child through the advertisements.

She revealed to the officials that she was compelled to abandon her child after her partner

Mariela Sr Coline Fanon

Author - Book "Mom, I am not dead" Kennes Editions

1w

The Lost Roots Foundation - Raíces Perdidas submitted its request to

Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to become an Observer. This will be accepted or refused after the vote of the signatory states of the #LaHaye convention

Hartini van Rijssel and MayaSari van Rijswijk, both adopted, searched in vain for relatives in Indonesia. After forty years, the two half-sisters find each other in the Netherlands. “A Christmas miracle.”

Hartini (40) cannot believe her eyes at the beginning of this month when she reads the results of the DNA test. After years of searching, she has a close family match. What? With her? I've known her for a long time, but I never expected this.

There was one woman who thought she was my mother, but a DNA test showed that we are not related at all.

Hartini of Lille

Alone on the world

Resolution file
The information here reflects the current status of the procedure
Printable PDF version
Identification
Reference RSP/2005/2590
Title Resolution on the trafficking in children in Guatemala
Legal Basis EP 122
Subject(s) 4.10.03 Child protection, children's rights
6.10.09 Human rights situation in the world
Stage reached Procedure completed
Stages
Stages Documents: references Dates
Source reference Equivalent references Votes and amendments Joint resolution of document of publication in Official Journal
EP: motion for resolution EP B6-0415/2005 RC-B6-0415/2005 05/07/2005
EP: motion for resolution EP B6-0419/2005 05/07/2005
EP: motion for resolution EP B6-0431/2005 05/07/2005
EP: motion for resolution EP B6-0435/2005 05/07/2005
EP: motion for resolution EP B6-0436/2005 05/07/2005
EP: motion for resolution EP B6-0438/2005 05/07/2005
EP: vote on B series resolution EP T6-0304/2005 07/07/2005 C 157 06.07.2006, p. 0413-0494 E

07/07/2005 - EP: vote on B series resolution
The European Parliament adopted a resolution on trafficking in children in Guatemala.

The text adopted in plenary had been tabled as a joint resolution by the EPP-ED, PES, ALDE, Greens/EFA, GUE/NGL and UEN groups.

The Parliament notes that, according to the UN special rapporteur's report on the sale and trafficking of children, Guatemala's laws on adoption are among the least stringent in the region, while trafficking in children is not even classified as a crime. Moreover, the abuses occurring in Guatemala include forced or surrogate pregnancies, removal of children from their real mothers, substitution of documents, alteration of public records, and the existence of clandestine'nurseries'. Abuses are also committed by those authorising adoptions, while an increasing number of international adoption agencies are offering children for sale.

Given that Guatemala is a source, transit and destination country for women and children from Guatemala and other Central American countries who are trafficked for purposes of sexual and labour exploitation, the Parliament condemns trafficking in children and the existence of an organised crime network with international connections and as well as the manipulation by the adoption agencies. The Parliament stresses that adoptions should only be carried by governmental bodies and non-profit organisations and calls on Guatemala to enact specific legislation on adoptions and to adopt suitable measures to prevent profiteering from international adoptions. It urges the Public Prosecutor's Office to take out penal proceedings against the criminal networks trafficking in children and calls for the launching of a global plan of priority actions aimed at children and adolescents in Latin America, in line with UNICEF measures.

Moreover, the Parliament notes that, in 2004, 527 women were murdered, with most involving firearms. It therefore calls on Guatemala to take the necessary measures to ensure that murders of women no longer go unpunished, and to take a proactive stand on women's rights.

Whilst the Parliament welcomes President Berger's declarations regarding abolition of the death penalty, it expects more from this government, notably measures against lynchings and to promote human rights.

Lastly, the Parliament reiterates its recommendation to the Commission, as made in its resolution of 10 April 2003, that the EU's future strategy for Guatemala for 2007-2013 should include social cohesion, the right to food, rural development and reform of the system of landholding and land use, as priority areas for future EU cooperation policy. According to the Parliament, this policy should also lay stress on eliminating illegal adoptions, firm support for human rights, ending impunity, respect for the rights of indigenous peoples, and promotion and protection of women's rights and the rights of the child.

People who are adopted as babies do not forget their native language. Recent research by Radboud University, among others, shows that Korean adoptees learn Korean more easily at a later age. Even if they were only a few months old at adoption.

Language learning begins in the womb. In the last term of pregnancy, when hearing is fully developed, the fetus already hears its mother talking endlessly. The baby is especially sensitive to the rhythm of his mother tongue and recognizes it immediately after birth. A child only really starts experimenting with sound sequences such as dadadada when he is six months old, in the so-called babbling phase. Until then, listening is key.

This knowledge that a baby gains in the first months of its life is never lost. Mirjam Broersma of the Center for Language Studies in Nijmegen discovered this when she introduced 29 Korean adoptees in the Netherlands to their mother tongue. Together with colleagues from Australia and Korea, she published her results in Royal Society Open Science.

Subtle sound differences

With the exception of the control group, the participants in Broersma's study were born in Korea. They were adopted at a very young age by Dutch-speaking parents. Half of them were younger than six months at the time of adoption, the other half were older than seventeen months (but younger than six years). During the study, the participants were between 23 and 41 years old. The people in the control group were born and raised Dutch people of about the same age as the people in the adoption group. They were also comparable in other respects, such as educational level and number of times they had visited Korea.

Hundreds of Chileans adopted abroad have learned that they were trafficked. Investigators believe thousands of children may have been taken from their parents during Chile’s dictatorship.

Growing up in Minnesota, Tyler Graf knew almost nothing about his birth mother. And what little he knew, he said, stung.

His adoption papers listed her name, Hilda del Carmen Quezada; her age, 26; the date, March 2, 1983; and the hospital where she gave birth to him in central Chile. The documents also included a judge’s note saying Ms. Quezada gave him up because she had little money and “other children to support.”

“I never thought that any excuse would be good enough,” said Mr. Graf, who is now a firefighter in Houston. “I carried that animosity, that chip on my shoulder, my whole life.”

The claim that his mother willingly gave him up hurt, Mr. Graf said, until he learned this year that he is one of hundreds — possibly thousands — of Chilean adoptees taken from their parents without their consent during the country’s military dictatorship.

It seemed like a fairy tale ending: a poor Chinese couple who spent 14 years searching for their lost son are finally reunited with the boy as his kidnappers face justice. But it’s not that simple. As Sun Zhuo is reunited with his birth family in Shenzhen, he’s faced with the prospect of the family he knew as his own being sent to prison.

In 2007, then 4-year-old Sun Zhuo was abducted from the southern city of Shenzhen, setting his biological parents on a desperate search that would last 14 years. Sun Haiyang, his father, offered a 200,000 yuan reward for clues and changed the name of his steamed bun shop to advertise it. His story won national attention, and was adapted into a 2014 movie called “Dearest.” He has become an iconic figure in the field of anti-trafficking, and his account on microblogging service Weibo, named “Sun Haiyang Looking for Son,” has over 116,000 followers.

Meanwhile, Sun Zhuo was growing up with two older sisters in Shandong province, about 1,800 kilometers from Shenzhen, unaware that the couple raising him were not his birth parents.

Chinese police identified Sun, now 18, during a crackdown on child trafficking. The police arrested a total of nine suspects involved in abducting three children, including Sun Zhuo. His identity was later confirmed by DNA testing.

On Monday, Sun Haiyang finally met his son after 14 years, while the second family is facing potential criminal charges.

http://www.cna.gob.gt/Documentos/EstadoHogares.pdf

SURVEY "The channels of international adoption" (1/3). Over the past sixty years, hundreds of thousands of children from Latin America, Asia and Africa have been adopted by European or North American couples, sometimes in violation of the law. As adults, some seek the truth about their story. First part of our investigation: between Guatemala and France.

On the walls of the office, dozens of photos tarnished by time. People smile at each other, kiss each other. “This is the first reunion that we have organized, a dad with his daughter… In 2001.” Marco Garavito is still moved by these images, the fruit of more than two decades of labor. The 70-year-old man is responsible for Todos por el reencuentro (“All for the reunion”), one of the programs of the Guatemalan League of Mental Health, a psychological support organization specializing in the search for 5,000 children missing during the long armed conflict between the military and the Marxist guerrillas (200,000 dead between 1960 and 1996).

Marco Garavito shows us around the little house, built around a patio filled with plants, in the center of the capital, Guatemala. Four people work with self-sacrifice within this program, without any help from the State, paying out of their own pockets for translators of the twenty-two Mayan languages, covering kilometers of bumpy tracks to reach remote villages. “We currently have 1,300 cases,” explains our host. At the beginning, we were looking for the children in Guatemala; then it was necessary to expand abroad. Two hundred of them would be in Europe, especially in France, Belgium and Italy. "

Coline, Marie-Laure and Pattie-Maëlle were all born in Guatemala and adopted in Europe. But the first two were stolen from their birth families, and the last one grew up with a false mother name on her record. To help people in a similar situation shed light on their history, they created the Lost Roots Foundation.

Helping adoptees born in Guatemala to reunite with their families: this is the main goal of Lost Roots. The foundation was created in early 2021, created by people themselves born in this small Latin American country and adopted in Europe.

Some of them were victims of child trafficking during the Guatemalan armed conflict (1960-1996). This is the case of Coline , born Mariela in Guatemala in 1986, and adopted in Belgium when she was eleven months old. When she becomes a mother, she begins a quest for her origins to answer her daughter's questions.

Many times in her life she had tried to find answers, without success. "There was no structure to do research, so it was a bit like wild research," she explains.

Child trafficking involving the ex-sister-in-law of dictator Oscar Mejia Victores