The adoption of children from the United States, and more specifically from New York State, becomes possible. The Flemish Center for Adoption (VCA) has approved the collaboration between adoption service Het Kleine Mirakel and New York. Kind & Gezin, Flemish Minister of Welfare Jo Vandeurzen and Federal Minister of Justice Koen Geens report this in a press release.

Editorial 15-01-16, 18:04 Last update: 16-01-16, 17:01 Source: BELGA

In New York, one adoption service will mediate for children who are given up by their biological parents shortly after birth. It will usually involve parents in very precarious situations.

You can now start with five test files. Candidate adoptive parents who have a suitability judgment can contact the adoption service. More information about the conditions that the candidates must meet and the working method can be found on the Kind & Gezin website. All costs incurred in the course of the process will be borne by the candidates.

Ministers Vandeurzen and Geens are satisfied with the new adoption channel. "This is good news for prospective adoptive parents, including same-sex couples," says Vandeurzen. "With this we also show that adoption has a future. Geens is positive about the guarantees that have been built in.

Bucharest Daily News - 02-feb-06 - Denisa Maruntoiu

While parents and the Romanian authorities are struggling over the 1,100 orphans still caught in the middle of the convoluted international adoptions conflict, high ranking European officials including the Council of Europe's Deputy Secretary Maud de Boer-Buquicchio and European Parliament Member Baroness Emma Nicholson, are gathering in Bucharest for the annual International Conference on Children's Rights. The two-day conference starting today, organized under the patronage of the Council of Europe's Ministers' Committee, aims to find viable solutions for all the problems and challenges affecting the world's children, including the thorny international adoption issue. However, the stories of several Romanian adoptees, some happy, some tragic, illustrate how difficult it might be to find a balanced solution when it comes to children and their future.

Every night when Kathleen Richards reads her six-year-old son Alexandru his favorite bedtime story, she thinks about a little girl whom she will never get to kiss good-night.

Larisa, 4, is more than 5,000 kilometers away, in Romania, and Kathleen doesn't really know how to tell her son that the girl who should have been his sister will never come home to Keene, New Hampshire. That the toys and presents brought by Santa are all for him. That Larisa will get none. The Richards' mission is almost impossible, as Alexandru has been waiting for Larisa more than four years already. Kathleen and her husband David do not know how they can make a six year old understand why Romania, which is Alexandru's native country too, rejected their request to adopt Larisa.

Kathleen, a lifelong Keene resident, and David, a city councilor, have been married for 12 years. Immediately after their wedding, when they were both 30 years old, Kathleen found out she could not have a pregnancy because of infertility. Because they desperately wanted a child, they started working on the process of trying to adopt. "The laws required that we wait until we had been married two years before actually starting to look for a child, so in August 1996 we were officially granted the right to adopt from the U.S. or abroad," says Kathleen.

The proper procedure entails that these children enter the legal adoption pool, which is critical not only for their well-being but also for the legal protection of the family unit formed through adoption

The second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India has created unprecedented chaos, upended health systems, and claimed an inordinate number of lives. The trajectory of new infections may be ebbing, but it has taken a severe toll on the most vulnerable cohort — children.

All children have the right to protection, to survive, to belong, be heard and receive care in a safe and healthy environment. Their parents are their first line of protection. Today, thousands of children have been orphaned with the virus claiming the lives of their parents. Many of them have no family and, therefore, no protection.

According to figures given out by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, 3,621 children were orphaned and 274 abandoned between April 1, 2021 to June 5, 2021. Many among them may not have close relatives or their extended families may be unwilling or incapable of taking them in.

Almost anyone who has a smartphone has received WhatsApp messages, describing horror stories of young children orphaned by Covid-19, seeking their “adoption”. Such messages, howsoever well-intentioned, are both irresponsible and illegal. These orphaned children are more susceptible than ever and vulnerable to traffickers or criminals, thanks to people trying to help without following due process.

The possibility for adoptive parents to have their child's parentage data removed from the Basic Registration Persons (BRP) must be ended.

That is what the Christian Union thinks. The party will therefore submit a proposal on Wednesday to remove this possibility from the law.

PEDIGREE DATA

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 threshold will be raised for adoptees who (at a later age) 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.

A report containing proposals for a redress scheme for the survivors of mother-and-baby homes is set to be completed next week.

The Interdepartmental Group report is expected to submit its findings to Minister for Children Roderic O'Gorman in the coming days.

It is understood that the redress scheme could provide payments to survivors based on the length of time they spent in the homes.

Survivors are also likely to receive what has been described as an "enhanced medical card".

Once the Interdepartmental Group has issued its report to Minister O'Gorman, the matter would then go to Cabinet in July when the minister would bring a memo to Government outlining the scheme in full.

The Mother & Baby Homes Commission of Inquiry returned to the public's attention as one of the Commissioners decided to speak about it for the first time at an invitation-only Oxford University zoom

The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman started off looking like he might have a quiet fortnight. By the end of the first week, he found himself on air arguing that he might have to withhold redress from Mother & Baby Home survivors if they insisted on their experiences being officially recognised.

By the end of the second week, his Government was saying it planned to appoint another expert to do a new report into those testimonies to address the Commission report’s failures.

Apart from the continuing marvel of a Minister apparently eager to continue to put the torch to his own credibility in order to act as a spokesman for his Department’s unsustainable policy positions, the past two weeks have provided a kaleidoscope of views into how power in Ireland works now.

This is the Gist.

Family Minister Michael Falzon is aware of at least 6 Maltese couples who have still chosen to go to India to adopt a child, in spite of a devastating Covid-19 wave in the country which has claimed the life of a prospective adoptive father.

47-year-old Ivan Barbara and his wife had travelled to India to adopt a girl last March, but ended up succumbing to Covid-19 in April, before evacuation could be carried out. His widow had also contracted Covid-19, but recovered and has since returned to Malta with the daughter they had adopted.

Maltese COVID-19 patient dies in India before being evacuated

During question time on Tuesday’s parliamentary sitting, Falzon was asked a number of questions on adoption, and revealed that the couples who had gone to India to adopt a child had even asked whether the authorities would stop them.

“But who am I to do so,” Falzon reflected. “You have to be in their shoes.”

"It is an overwhelming phenomenon to contemplate the same beautiful full moon here, in Addis Ababa, as in Madrid or anywhere in the world!" Alfredo thought upon arriving in the Ethiopian capital and following the established process to adopt a child (a girl , in this case) in the immense African country. Alfredo had to undertake the journey in Paris before, since Ethiopia did not have an embassy in Madrid. He narrates that his first experience with Ethiopian officials was not very spirited: "Correct for the resolution of his efforts, but cold."

Alfredo and his wife, Stella, decided to spend those Christmases of 2005 in their house in the coastal town of Vera with friends, and there they received the news that they had a life to adopt. It is then when Alfredo decides to start writing "The Moon of Addis Abeba" (Letrame Editorial; Almería, 2020) and in which he recounts over almost 400 pages the real journey of an adoption by a Spanish marriage of a happy Ethiopian girl four-year-old, who in adolescence emanates from within a volcanic fury in search of his own identity.

According to LA RAZÓN, “it is not until February 2006 that Asha's face appears before us. It was only a first meeting, because the girl would remain in a House of Transition, where she would learn Spanish and would be prepared for the home that awaited her with open arms. The parents set out for Addis Ababa to pick up their daughter Asha after the court ruling. Memories, as Alfredo confesses, of a very poor country, of some officials at the airport used to "keep the change", of a merciless orphanage.

The first days in Spain, which coincided with the Easter holidays, were a real test of effort for the parents, with a girl who was looking for the breast of her adoptive mother, suffered nocturnal enuresis and attacks of rage . Alfredo, the biological father of a young woman who had become independent from a first marriage, was often struck by serious doubts as to whether he would know how to cope with the new situation of a loving and challenging girl in equal measure.

He says that his little girl was very intelligent, she quickly learned correct Spanish, but she did not stop evoking memories of her biological family that she must have carried deep inside. "For her it must have been a great detachment, a painful uprooting of its deepest roots , of which at that time we were not aware," he admits.

ASSIGNMENT REVIEW · On Tuesday, the Riksdag decided that the government should as soon as possible investigate how Swedish authorities and adoption organizations have handled international adoptions to Sweden. The decision comes after several revelations about historical irregularities with adoptions to Sweden from, among others, Chile.

In 2018 , SVT together with Chilean journalists revealed how adopted children from Chile in the 1970s and 80s may have been taken without the consent of mothers. In the spring of 2021, Dagens Nyheter also reviewed adoptions to Sweden - and last week, Assignment Review published the series "The Stolen Children" , about the Chilean adoptions.

Now the Riksdag has decided that the government should as soon as possible investigate the international adoptions to Sweden from the middle of the 20th century until today. The decision comes after a proposal from the Social Affairs Committee and will, among other things, look at how Swedish authorities and adoption organizations have handled the adoptions.

Martina Johansson (C) thinks that Sweden should have appointed an investigation much earlier.

- I think it's a great pity. We have lost three years investigating what Sweden has played a part in this, she says.

INTERVIEW WITH BENOIT VAN KEIRSBILCK, Director of DCI-Belgium

Benoit Van Keirsbilck, Director of DCI-Belgium and former President of the DCI Movement, has been elected as a member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), in November 2020. He is the first-ever Belgian to be elected to this Committee. Mr. Van Keirsbilck has a 35-year career dedicated to the promotion and protection of children’s rights at the national, European and international levels.

He has been a leading force for campaigns to release children deprived of liberty and advance access to justice for children. He was a member of the Expert Group in charge of the drafting of the Council of Europe Guidelines on Child-Friendly Justice. In this interview, Gemma Cavaliere, from the International Secretariat asks Mr. Van Keirsblick the current challenges and future perspectives as newly elected member of the CRC.

In your opinion, what are the most pressing issues for children’s rights in 2021?

I do not think I will be very original here. We know that COVID-19 will affect children’s rights in 2021 and the years to come. Nevertheless, it is important to stress the fact that children’s rights have not always been considered a priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. In national lockdowns, for instance, the right to education was easily sacrificed in many countries, with the closure of schools and leisure centers for children and youth.