New Delhi: Five people, including a couple, were in

connection with the alleged kidnapping of a three-year-old

girl in outer Delhi’s Raj Park, police said on Friday. Ravi (26), his

wife Santosh (25), Mahesh (25), Guddan (26) and Ram Prasad

(36) were arrested and the child was safely and

In a case regarding the custody of a 13-year-old boy, heard as a habeas corpus petition by his biological parents accusing his uncle and foster father of kidnapping and keeping the child in illegal custody, a division bench of the Gujarat High Court gave priority to the child’s desire and directed that the child may continue in the custody of his foster father, in an order dated January 19.

The boy, born to a Botad couple in 2006, was adopted by his father’s sister and her then husband. The adoption was formalised by December 2008. However, the couple who adopted the boy divorced by mutual consent in July 2019 and it was agreed upon that their child will continue with the foster mother and the adoption deed would be revoked.

Read |CBI nabs 2 for selling child sexual abuse material through social media

The custody was thus handed over to the foster mother and biological parents. The child was residing at Patdi in Surendranagar since the age of two years until 12 years. He was attending school and had friends in the locality. However, he was taken to his foster mother’s native place in Botad where the child found it difficult to adjust. His schooling was interrupted with no school admission processed by the biological parents.

“The biological mother and the foster mother voluntarily called up the foster father and asked him to take away child… as he was not able to adjust to the new place,” advocate Amrita Ajmera, representing the foster father, submitted before the court, in response to the habeas corpus petition moved by the biological parents in December 2020, seeking that their child be produced before the court.

KOLKATA: CID officials investigating the baby trafficking racket operating from Kolkata and the two adjoining Parganas said they have now have proof that even adoption centres were part of the trafficking racket. CID sources said that among the 50 “workable” leads received so far from various complainants ever since the baby trafficking racket news became public, there have been three specific complaints against a Prafulla Kanan based Special Adoption Agency (SAA) close to Habra.

The local Child Welfare Committee too has now informed the CID that they were forced to stop the SAA from functioning in 2015 and lodge a case at Habra police station after the SAA officials sent a child for adoption without completing basic formalities. “There was a particular case where a man killed his wife and the child was sent to the centre. Without anyone’s knowledge, this child was put up for adoption,” said a source. A final decision on a separate probe on adoption agencies are now being mulled at Bhawani Bhawan, claimed sources.

Meanwhile, even as the CID has begun recording the statements of crucial witnesses in the baby trafficking racket that has witnessed 20 arrests so far, it seems it has found a legal solution to a tricky question. As of now, it has been decided by the top brass not to book any one of the five odd sets parents who had reportedly “paid” the trafficking gang in order to “adopt” the child.

“Adoption is a long and lengthy process. One of the key factors is whether the babies were orphans or whether their biological parents had permitted them to adopt their parents. Unless we trace the real parents or they appear before us willingly, we cannot go ahead and slap charges against them. Hence a decision on this – including whether we can use their testimonies in court to bolster our case - will be taken later after we get the DNA tests of the rescued babies completed,” said an investigating officer adding that the time to record their statements in court under CrPC 164 was yet to arrive.

CID officers said that now that most of the main gang members of one such module has been nabbed, they will be concentrating on establishing the entire modus operandi of the gang. “Just like the foster parents, there are a chunk of other people – nursing home nurses, staffers, ambulance drivers and even some doctors – who knowingly or unknowingly helped the gang. But then, we are dealing with them on a case to case basis. Too many arrests might lead to the big players managing to wriggle away,” commented a senior officer at Bhawani Bhavan.

Shyanne Klupp was 20 years old and homeless when she met her boyfriend in 2009. Within weeks, the two had married, and within months, she was pregnant. “I was so excited,” says Klupp. Soon, however, she learned that her new husband was facing serious jail time, and she reluctantly agreed to start looking into how to place their expected child for adoption. The couple called one of the first results that Google spat out: Adoption Network Law Center (ANLC).

Klupp says her initial conversations with ANLC went well; the adoption counselor seemed kind and caring and made her and her husband feel comfortable choosing adoption. ANLC quickly sent them packets of paperwork to fill out, which included questions ranging from personal-health and substance-abuse history to how much money the couple would need for expenses during the pregnancy.

Klupp and her husband entered in the essentials: gas money, food, blankets and the like. She remembers thinking, “I’m not trying to sell my baby.” But ANLC, she says, pointed out that the prospective adoptive parents were rich. “That’s not enough,” Klupp recalls her counselor telling her. “You can ask for more.” So the couple added maternity clothes, a new set of tires, and money for her husband’s prison commissary account, Klupp says. Then, in January 2010, she signed the initial legal paperwork for adoption, with the option to revoke. (In the U.S., an expectant mother has the right to change her mind anytime before birth, and after for a period that varies state by state. While a 2019 bill proposing an explicit federal ban of the sale of children failed in Congress, many states have such statutes and the practice is generally considered unlawful throughout the country.)

Klupp says she had recurring doubts about her decision. But when she called her ANLC counselor to ask whether keeping the child was an option, she says, “they made me feel like, if I backed out, then the adoptive parents were going to come after me for all the money that they had spent.” That would have been thousands of dollars. In shock, Klupp says, she hung up and never broached the subject again. The counselor, who no longer works with the company, denies telling Klupp she would have to pay back any such expense money. But Klupp’s then roommates—she had found housing at this point—both recall her being distraught over the prospect of legal action if she didn’t follow through with the adoption. She says she wasn’t aware that an attorney, whose services were paid for by the adoptive parents, represented her.

“I will never forget the way my heart sank,” says Klupp. “You have to buy your own baby back almost.” Seeing no viable alternative, she ended up placing her son, and hasn’t seen him since he left the hospital 11 years ago.

Door Frankrijk 'ontvoerde' kinderen van La Réunion eisen excuses

Frank Renout

correspondent Frankrijk · Ga naar het Twitter account van Frank Renout

Een groep kinderen van het eiland La Réunion voor de kust van Oost-Afrika eist excuses van de Franse regering. Ze werden in de jaren 60 en 70 'meegenomen' door de Franse autoriteiten en verhuisd naar het Franse platteland. Ouders werd vaak valse beloftes gedaan. De kinderen werden na aankomst in Frankrijk soms tot wees verklaard of kregen een nieuwe identiteit.

"We zijn inmiddels 50 jaar verder. Er is niet één regering die iets voor ons heeft gedaan. Het is de hoogste tijd voor excuses", zegt Inel Annette. Hij is lid van een belangenvereniging die de kinderen van destijds hebben opgericht.

Although the ministry recently announced that more than 36 million euros will be

made available for a national expertise center, but there is still no money being

made available for individual searches and DNA research, there is still some

progress in the possibilities to give the mothers in Indonesia and adoptees in the

Netherlands.

'Retain adoption options from certain countries'

June 7, 2021-

Retain adoption opportunities from certain countries. COC Nederland and Meer dan Gewenst make that appeal in a letter to the House of Representatives, which will discuss the adoption policy on Wednesday 9 June.

UPDATE June 10:

The adoption ban for children from abroad may end in the autumn for certain countries. That is what Minister Dekker (Legal Protection) said on 9 June during the adoption debate in the House of Representatives. More than Desired, COC, other organizations and MPs had insisted on this.

The possibility for adoptive parents to have their child's parentage data removed from the Basic Registration Persons (BRP) must be ended. That is the view of the Christian Union (CU). The party will submit a proposal on Wednesday to remove this possibility from the law.

The adoptive parents can still choose, if their adopted child is younger than 16, to delete, for example, the name of one or both biological parents or the nationality of the child. According to the ChristenUnie, if this happens, an extra barrier will be raised for adopted children who want to know where they come from.

In addition, this authority for the parents is at odds with the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the party states.

“Everyone has the right to know where he or she comes from,” says ChristenUnie MP Don Ceder. “When an adopted child embarks on that quest, there should be no unnecessary obstacles. The interests of the (adopted) child must be paramount during this process.”

The House of Representatives will debate the BRP on Thursday. The CU's proposal is also discussed.

ASSIGNMENT REVIEW · Rumors of stolen children. An investigation into crimes against humanity. The story of the stolen adopted children from Chile spans several decades and affects hundreds of divided families. Assignment review is now publishing a new series about what happened when the children were taken to Sweden.

The rumor

There have long been suspicions and rumors that children were stolen from Chile in the 1970s and 80s. In the early 2000s, Chilean journalism student Ana Maria Olivares decides to investigate the rumor and travels around the country to meet mothers who testify that their children disappeared during the dictatorship. In 2003, she publishes her essay in which she describes a network of people who in various ways have taken children from their mothers and then taken the children out of Chile - and that it is not about individual cases, but a pattern.

• New revelations

In 2018, SVT will, together with Chilean journalists, present new revelations about how adopted children in the 1970s and 80s may have been taken without the consent of mothers. Networks of adoptees are created and several Chilean parents get in touch with children whom they say have long believed to be dead or missing. Demands for a Swedish, state investigation are beginning to be made.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Bringing her camera to a home for unwed mothers on South Korea’s Jeju island, Sun Hee Engelstoft anticipated an empowering story about young women keeping their babies.

Instead, she ended up with a raw and unsettling documentary about how a deeply conservative sexual culture, loose birth registration laws and a largely privatized adoption system continue to pressure and shame single mothers into relinquishing their children for adoption.

The shock and grief of mother-child separations and intense fear of social stigma captured in “Forget Me Not” offer insight into what’s preventing thousands of Korean adoptees from reconnecting with their silenced birth mothers, decades after they were flown to the West.

Adoptees, including Engelstoft, have also blamed these disconnections on limited access to records, falsified documents that hide their true origins and a lack of accountability shown by adoption agencies and South Korea’s government.

“Every time I started following a woman (at the home), they strongly told me that they wanted to keep their child, and that’s just not what happened,” Engelstoft said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I was completely horrified at the result.”