MADURAI: The recent incident of child trafficking and illegal adoption through a city-based NGO, Idhayam Trust, has put the highlight on the need to educate society against stigmatising childless couples and sensitise it to the nitty-gritty of legal adoption system.

“A family is not complete without a child,” *Rani and *Rajan are told repeatedly by those around them. Having been childless for over a decade, the couple found themselves at the receiving end of heartless stigmatisation, isolation, and humiliation, most of it directed at Rani.

“We were treated a failure by our family members. We were ridiculed during social gatherings and ostracised from family functions. My in-laws called me maladi and said they would get rid of me and make my husband marry a ‘fertile’ woman. My husband was supportive, but I lived with the insecurity for years until we moved out and cut ties with our families,” said Rani.

For Rajan, the harassment was centred on social status. “My colleagues and elders from the family told me that I would need a child to look after us in our old age and to perform my last rites. When others discussed schools and future plans of their children, I would be ridiculed and ignored,” said Rajan.

The case of Rani and Rajan is not an isolated one; almost all childless couples come across such situations. Many of these couples have already applied for adoption. As for Rani and Rajan, they are waiting for a call from the government for the past three and a half year now.

The highest-ranking Guatemalan diplomat in the UN, Edmond Mulet, has been widely regarded as “the honorable candidate” who could rescue the country’s corruption-ridden political system.

But suddenly, reports that Mulet was investigated for child trafficking by the Guatemalan authorities in 1981 have appeared like a nasty blotch of ink smeared across his impeccable resume. They are also a severe blow to the UN’s credibility in Latin America, given the fact that UNICEF spent years lobbying the Guatemalan government to pass stricter adoption laws that would put an end to child trafficking.

A Guatemalan, Mulet is the UN Joint Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations. He has also expressed an interest in running for president in the forthcoming September elections as a candidate for the Todos party. Disgraced former president Alfonso Portillo, who will be released from federal prison in the US on Feb. 25, after having served less than a year of his six-year sentence for conspiring to launder $2.5 million through the US banking system, is allegedly one of his key supporters.

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November 1981. A police detective squad bursts into suite number 338 of the luxurious Camino Real Hotel in Guatemala City. They're dressed in plain clothes. They arrest four Canadian women who are about to take five Guatemalan children back to their home country. One of the women arrested was going to adopt a new born baby. Another was going to adopt a three year old boy and was also going to take a 20-day-old baby with her to be adopted by a Canadian couple. The other two women had the same intentions: each of them were going to take a baby back to adoptive parents in their home country. The Police takes the children to the Elisa Martínez national orphanage while it investigates what it believes to be a child trafficking ring. On November 24th, at 10 am, the Police arrests Edmond Auguste Mulet Lesieur in his office.

Edmond Mulet belongs to a family that has produced a number of high profile journalists and diplomats. Today, he is one of the most highly respected and admired figures in Guatmalan society. In 2013, he was awarded the Doctor Mariano Gálvez Order by the university of the same name that he graduated from and in 2011, Prensa Librenewspaper named him "Person of the Year." Mulet, 63, speaks slowly and clearly and is a man of delicate manners who won a seat in Congress on three occasions, served as President of Congress, Guatemalan ambassador to the United States and the European Union and also served as director of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. Since he was appointed UN Assistant Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations in 2007, he has become the highest-ranking Guatemalan diplomat in the UN.

However, in 1981, Mulet was a young lawyer, in his thirties, who was launching his career in politics and intended to run for a seat in Congress as a National Party for Renovation (Partido Nacional Renovador, PNR) candidate in the forthcoming congressional elections . Also I was part of an international adoption ring called Les Enfants du Soleil / The Children of the Sun .

A few years earlier, in 1977, a change in Guatemalan law made it possible for adoption proceedings to be carried out by a notary. As a result, from the early 80s onwards, the adoption industry began to take off and became a highly profitable.

As Guatemala gained a reputation for being a country where it was easy to adopt a child, the demand for Guatemalan children grew in Europe, the United States and Canada. The sums that adoptive parents were willing to pay for a Guatemalan child also began to increase. The fact that 50% of the Guatemalan population lived below the poverty line and that the armed conflict had left thousands of orphans and vulnerable infants created the ideal conditions for the adoption business to flourish. Lawyers were eager to get their hands on the business.

Adopted children commonly face mental trauma with new families. Adjusting to a new environment, being surrounded by strangers and so many questions lashed out on them about families or past experiences place them into a difficult situation. Besides a happy beginning, a safe and secure grounding with a healthy caregiver is needed most. Their brains won’t stop thinking with one time comfort been provided by you. They’ll test you so many times in various ways. And this can cause big trouble to the adoptive families too.

An open-minded family, along with more group support, can help reduce such problems by acknowledging and addressing them without passing judgment on the child.

The adoption process in general is a tiresome journey. Parents go through many troubles to adopt a child. Hence, their openness and resilience can accommodate the mental issues being faced by the adopted children.

Psychiatrists suggest parents to pay attention to the behavioural part of their children. They say parents often ignore such incidents and on a later course regret not addressing them at the right moment. But mostly they never understand what was the area of focusing. In most cases, adoptive parents do not notice such events until a specialist points them out.

Seeking expert help to nurture a healthy relationship with your child is no shame. When you see anything different in your kid’s behaviour you can always visit a doctor. Explain your areas of concern and changes you’ve noticed so far. The first place is always the family doctor, and seek help from a paediatrician if they are not sure of the condition. He will assess your children and if needed refer you to specialists like a psychiatrist.

MADURAI: As of July 8, 295 children are missing in the State. The number would have been 297 had the two toddlers sold into illegal adoption by an NGO in Madurai not been rescued. The incident raises several questions over the effectiveness of existing systems to ensure the safety of abandoned women and children in the State.

The Madurai incident came to light after a one-year-old boy, who was under the care of one Idhayam Trust, was claimed to have died of Covid at the Government Rajaji Hospital (GRH). An investigation, however, revealed that he, along with another toddler, was sold to illegal adoption by the chief executive director of the trust, GR Sivakumar, and his accomplices.

It turned out that the NGO, which had been recognised with several State awards and worked closely with the police for over ten years, used the ‘trust’ of the public to pursue unscrupulous activities. Notably, the same NGO had been allocated a building by the Madurai Corporation less than a year ago to look after the destitute rescued during the lockdown. Soon after the aforementioned incident, three more children were rescued in similar cases of illegal adoption near Jaihindpuram in Madurai.

Subsequently, all NGO-run Homes in the district were inspected by the District Social Welfare Department following an order by Collector S Aneesh Sekhar. Madurai also has two Central government-aided Homes and one State government-aided Home.

According to District Social Welfare Officer, Helen Rose, around 20 of the 39 Homes in Madurai were functioning without registration. “They have been told to register with the department soon. This apart, registration process is underway for 5 Homes. Eleven have renewed their licenses. While one Home was shut down by the district administration, two others did so themselves,” she said.

Some maternity wards in Turkmenistan secretly offer abandoned babies for illegal adoption to prospective parents willing to pay a bribe to skip the normal bureaucracy and long wait that goes with the process, several sources tell RFE/RL.

The illegal deal often involves employees from registry offices who provide the new parents with false birth certificates that show them as the biological parents, the sources claim.

People with knowledge of the deals blame rampant corruption in the agencies involved in the legal adoption process for pushing some parents to a "cheaper and faster" option.

RFE/RL spoke to a married couple who admitted illegally adopting a baby in 2020 after paying about $4,300 in bribes. The couple, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they initially tried for three years to adopt a child legally, but without success.

Like many other countries, Turkmenistan requires prospective parents to provide documents from various agencies to ensure their suitability to adopt a child. The couple said they diligently assembled the necessary documents and submitted them, but each official involved in the process demanded bribes and deliberately delayed the process, the husband said.

'Adopted' woman, 56, reveals horror at learning her parents illegally BOUGHT her from a Georgia baby trafficker - after spending 13 years searching for answers about her birth mom

Jane Blasio, 56, from Akron, Ohio, was one of the hundreds of babies who were trafficked out of Dr. Thomas J. Hicks's clinic in McCaysville, Georgia

From the 1940s through the 1960s, the small-town doctor sold more than 200 newborns to out-of-state couples, many of which hailed from the Akron area

Blasio was told she was adopted when she was six, but it wasn't until she was a teenager that she the discrepancies on her birth certificate

Her mother, Joan, and father, Jim, were illegally named as her birth parents on the document, which also listed the Hicks Clinic

OPINION: There’s an unfathomable quality about TV programmes such as Long Lost Family, or its antipodean cousin, David Lomas’ Lost and Found. The narratives are heartbreakingly familiar: a child adopted out to loving parents enjoys a happy childhood, only to discover in later life that a piece of the “who am I” puzzle is missing. There’s a void in their identity, which the programme naturally manages to fill.

Redemption makes for top-rating telly that’s guaranteed to shed a tear among the voyeuristic like you and me. What these programmes blithely ignore is that, for the approximately 80,000 people who’ve been adopted between 1955-85, the state has engaged in sanctioned child-trafficking that redistributed children from single mothers to couples who couldn’t have children, claiming the birth mothers had a choice – when they didn’t.

Now finally, the most antiquated of the three pieces of legislation surrounding adoption, the 1955 Adoption Act, is under review.

The Ministry of Justice has released a discussion paper “Adoption in Aotearoa New Zealand”, reviewing the act. It’s seeking submissions on six key issues: what is adoption and who is involved; cultural aspects of adoption, including wh?ngai? or atawhai; how the adoption process works in New Zealand and offshore; the impacts of adoption; and the adoption process for a surrogate child.

READ MORE:

A decision by Israel’s supreme court Sunday paved the way for same-sex couples to have children through surrogacy, capping a decade-old legal battle in what activist groups hailed as a major advance for LGBTQ rights in Israel.

Restrictions on surrogacy for same-sex couples and single fathers in Israel must be lifted within six months, the court ruled, giving authorities time to prepare for the change while making clear that it is a definitive one.

“We won! And now it’s final,” the petitioners said in a statement, the Times of Israel reported. “This is a big step toward equality, not only for LGBT in Israel, but for everyone in Israel.”

Surrogacy was already permitted for heterosexual couples and single women. The law excluded same-sex couples, however, and some who couldn’t have kids with surrogate mothers in Israel turned to surrogates overseas.

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The issue of child adoption has been a part of the legislation for a long in Nepal. The 1963 Muluki Ain favoured adoptions by closed blood relatives or persons belonging to the same clan. Dharmaputra (adopted son) and dharmaputri (adopted daughter) also have some religious connections in Nepal.

Adoption primarily is viewed as an agreement involving inheritance or care for adoptive parents. However, in terms of law, there have been some shifts since the 1963 legislation. Currently, section 169 of the Civil Code, 2017, defines adoption as a situation in which a person accepts a son or daughter of another person as his or her son or daughter.

Following are some aspects relating to adoption from the perspective of the country’s law. These rules apply to an adoptive person who is a Nepali national. We will discuss the law for foreigners willing to adopt a child in Nepal in the next article.

Conditions for adoption

Section 172 of the Civil Code lays down criteria for anyone to adopt a child. The criteria are mentioned below: