A Texas woman who was a program manager at an Ohio-based international adoption agency pleaded guilty today in the Northern District of Ohio to schemes to procure adoptions of Ugandan and Polish children by bribing Ugandan officials and defrauding U.S. authorities.

According to court documents, Debra Parris, 69, of Lake Dallas, engaged in a scheme with others to bribe Ugandan officials to procure adoptions of Ugandan children by families in the United States. These bribes included payments to (a) probation officers intended to ensure favorable probation reports recommending that a particular child be placed into an orphanage; (b) court registrars to influence the assignment of particular cases to “adoption-friendly” judges; and (c) High Court judges to issue favorable guardianship orders for the adoption agency’s clients. In her plea agreement, Parris also admitted that she continued to direct the adoption agency’s clients to work with her alleged co-conspirator Dorah Mirembe, after knowing that Mirembe caused clients of the adoption agency to provide false information to the U.S. State Department for the purpose of misleading it in its adjudication of visa applications.

According to court documents, in a second scheme, after alleged co-conspirator Margaret Cole, the adoption agency’s Executive Director, learned that clients of the adoption agency determined they could not care for one of the two Polish children they were set to adopt, Parris and her co-conspirator took steps to transfer the Polish child to Parris’s relatives, who were not eligible for intercountry adoption. In her plea agreement, Parris also admitted that after the child was injured and hospitalized, Parris agreed with her co-conspirator to conceal their improper conduct from the U.S. State Department in an attempt to continue profiting from these adoptions.

Parris pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and commit visa fraud in connection with the Uganda scheme, and conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with the Poland scheme. She is scheduled to be sentenced on March 9, 2022. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Trial against Cole is scheduled to commence on Feb. 7, 2022. Mirembe remains at large.

The Thiruvananthapuram district child welfare committee has ordered that a child that was already

declared legally free for adoption and handed over to adoptive parents under preadoption foster care shall be returned to the adoption agency.

The order was issued in view of the claim by a woman that it was her child and her parents and

relatives gave the child for adoption without her consent.

Anupama Chandran, a 22-year-old woman hailing from Thiruvananthapuram, had also moved legally

KOLKATA: The West Bengal Commission for the Protection of Child Rights has asked the CID to trace the mothers of babies rescued after the child trafficking racket was busted earlier this month to secure a more assured future for them.Speaking to TOI, WBCPCR chairperson Ananya Chatterjee said it was urgent for investigators to find the mothers so that the Child Welfare Committee

“The babies that have been rescued are all less than a year old. Since the kingpins of the racket have already been arrested, interrogation should lead to the mothers. That is crucial to first find out if the mother had abandoned the child or she was tricked into believing the child had died during delivery . If she is an unwed mother and does not wish to take the baby , she has to formally surrender the baby . On ly then can CWC go ahead with the adoption procedure,“ said Chatterjee.

The CID said it had already begun work to trace the biological parents, beginning with a case that dates back to 2014 in which a woman had been handed the dead body of a child that appeared much older than a newborn. The woman has now approached the CID and expressed her suspicion that a two-year-old baby that Ujjala Byapari, an employee of the Machlandapur NGO under scanner, claims to have adopted is her son. The birth certificate produced by Byapari has already turned out to be fake. CID has also been approached by another woman who believes her baby was trafficked while she was told that it was stillborn.

With the kids having already passed through hell, Chatterjee felt it was in the child ren's interest that cops traced the mothers at the earliest. Time is also important because the adoption procedure itself is long-drawn and could even take a couple of years.

To avoid legal complication, all the babies will undergo DNA profiling so that samples are matched with either the women who are traced by cops or those that step forward to claim a child. With the laboratories capable of DNA profi ling already burdened with work, the cross-matching may take up to a year or more. CID sources said that they have spoken to the Gujarat FSL and Hyderabad FSL to undertake the DNA profiling as soon as the babies are healthy .

PHILOMENA LEE AND Mary Harney should have been given an opportunity to reply to the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes before the final version was published, their solicitor has argued.

Lee and Harney are two of several survivors of Mother and Baby Home who are seeking to have certain elements of the report quashed via a judicial review in the High Court.

Test cases involving Lee and Harney are being heard by Mr Justice Garrett Simons today and tomorrow. A test case is one brought forward that would then set a precedent for future similar cases.

Lee and Harney’s cases involve Section 34 of the Commission of Investigation Act 2004 – the women have taken issue with the fact they were not given a right to reply before the Commission’s final report was published in January. They believe some of the testimony they gave to the Commission was misrepresented in, or omitted from, the report.

The women’s legal teams are arguing that the Commission’s failure to give them a right to reply breaches the 2004 Act, as well as the women’s fundamental rights under the Irish Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights.

'CARA Extremely Callous In Complying With Court's Directions, Unnecessarily Harassing Adoptive Parents': Delhi HC Summons CEO, Member Secretary

The Delhi High Court has observed that the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA)

has been extremely callous in its approach towards compliance of a judicial order,

requiring the authority to frame guidelines for inter-country adoptions under Hindu

Adoptions & Maintenance Act (HAMA).

Asking people who want kids why they don't "just adopt" is a common refrain but actual adoption in Australia isn't all that common.

Just 334 adoptions were finalised in 2019-20.

So why don't more adoptions happen and what's really involved in the process?

Why are there so few adoptions in Australia?

There are a few reasons for this and we have to look at the three types of adoption to understand why.

THE CABINET IS due to sign off on a long-awaited redress plan for survivors of mother and baby homes and county homes today.

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman is bringing the proposals to his Cabinet colleagues this morning ahead of an official announcement this afternoon.

Survivors are eagerly awaiting the details of the scheme after numerous delays. The plan was originally due to be finalised by the end of April.

The scheme is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of euro. O’Gorman has written to a number of religious orders involved in running the institutions, asking them to contribute to the fund.

In its final report in January, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes recommended that women should have spent at least six months in an institution prior to 1974 – when the Unmarried Mothers’ Allowance came into effect – in order to be eligible for redress.

THE GOVERNMENT HAS unveiled the details of an €800 million redress plan for 34,000 survivors of mother and baby homes and county homes.

The scheme will provide financial payments and a form of enhanced medical card to “defined groups in acknowledgement of suffering experienced while resident” in a mother and baby institution or county institution.

All mothers who spent time in a Mother and Baby Institution will be eligible for a payment, which will increase based on their length of stay.

All children who spent six months or more in an institution will also be eligible for payment based on their length of stay, as long as they did not receive redress for that institution under the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme (RIRS).

Many survivors have this evening criticised this specific time limit, saying the length of time a child spent in an institution does not equate to the impact it had on their lives.

Swedish Yle reported (29.10) that serious errors in adoptions are examined in Sweden, and that irregularities can also occur in Finland. Patrik Lundberg, one of the journalists behind Dagens Nyheter's series of articles on Swedish international adoption activities, says that if it is a question of the same adoption countries, there is also great reason for Finland to review its adoptions. This is because the same orphanage has adopted children to several different countries in the western world, and because the same lawyers and corrupt people have been involved. According to Lundberg, control has been particularly poor in countries classified as dictatorships.

With reference to other countries' investigations of international adoptions, and given that Finland has in many cases used the same adoption contacts as, for example, Sweden, we demand that Finland also appoint its own independent inquiry. The issue of adoptions that have not gone right is not only limited to Sweden, whose government recently presented directives for an inquiry expected to be completed in the autumn of 2023, or the Netherlands, whose government earlier this year stopped all international adoptions after a comprehensive inquiry showed that children have been stolen or purchased from their biological parents.

We, who signed this submission, demand that the state of Finland investigate the international adoptions that have taken place to date, from all countries of origin from which Finland has adopted children. This also includes adoptions that took place after the Hague Convention was ratified. The inquiry shall be independent and autonomous and no members of the inquiry group may have any connection to the adoption mediation adoption organizations.

The inquiry should engage experts and research competencies in the field, such as lawyers, historians and researchers, so that the international adoption activities in Finland can be fully examined. The investigation must be given sufficient resources, both personnel, financially and in terms of time. In addition to adoptions mediated by adoption organizations, the inquiry must also examine independent adoptions (private adoptions) and the role of the Finnish state in international adoption mediation in Finland.

The inquiry shall contain proposals for measures on how to ensure that today's adoptions take place legally and ethically. The adoption agency must be quality assured and followed up in a comprehensive way. The inquiry must ensure that corruption does not occur in connection with adoptions today.

The Stormont executive has agreed to set up a public inquiry into institutions for unmarried mothers in Northern Ireland.

The proposal was one of a series of recommendations ministers were urged to adopt after a panel's report.

On Monday, Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill told the assembly all steps would be put in place "as quickly as possible".

That will include setting up immediate redress payments to survivors.

'A momentous day'