Authority

Court of Amsterdam

Date of judgment

10-12-2020

Date of publication

The temporary stop on foreign adoptions must be given up immediately. To that end, Karen Gregory, mother of two adopted children herself, wrote an open letter to outgoing minister Sander Dekker. 'There is so much more transparency now than back then', she says in the section Where is Waldy? in News and Co.

International adoptions have been suspended since the beginning of this year , in response to the report by the Joustra Committee on the Dutch adoption culture and the role of the government. According to the committee, the Netherlands has been too passive in the adoption processes in the past. The supervision would have been inadequate and no action was taken in the event of abuses that came to light. This concerns abuse of poverty, falsification of documents or biological parents who have had to give up their child under duress or for payment.

She does not deny that there have been abuses. 'Too many people looked away at the time and that is disgusting,' says Gregory. Nevertheless, she pleads for reversing the adoption ban. 'The adoption process now can no longer be compared with the process of thirty or forty years ago.' According to her, there are now many more rules, information courses and checks. Adoptive parents are now also monitored for a while by the Child Care and Protection Board.

Transparency

She herself is the mother of two adopted children from the United States. Her children's biological parents remain involved and there is a lot of transparency. When children are orphaned or abandoned, this transparency is not always self-evident. Nevertheless, Gregory thinks that adoption should continue here too. "It is the best child protection measure there is," says Say. 'Growing up in a children's home or foster care system is in most cases a worse option for children.'

Date of publication 19-05-2021

Case number C / 08/254208 / FA RK 20-2385FullscreeenPrint FacebookClipboard

Procedure Decision

Seat location Almelo

Jurisdictions Civil rights; Person-and familyright

Sun Hee Engelstoft, who was born in Busan in 1982, was 4 months old when she was flown to Denmark to meet her white adoptive parents.

Her biological mother had given her up for adoption, and through no choice of her own, she became part of the large adoption exodus: more than 210,000 babies have been sent overseas for adoption since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Engelstoft recalls that although she was the only Korean in her village, she has had a good life living in the midst of nature. She also lived for three years in a refugee camp in Botswana in the 1980s where her parents were volunteer workers.

"I have a strong bond with my adoptive family. I loved school, but I was always an outsider. When I would walk down the street, my schoolmates would touch my hair because it was dark and different from theirs. Overall it was a beautiful, but isolated time," she said during an interview with The Korea Times, Monday.

Having attended several schools for photography, she was accepted to the prestigious National Film School of Denmark, where she graduated in 2011.

There really is no convincing evidence that adoption abuses are still taking place, the intermediary agencies say. According to them, the fact that they could take place is not enough reason to stop adoptions.

Mediation organizations that oppose an intercountry adoption stop. It may not sound very surprising. Nevertheless, the four organizations that supervise adoptions from abroad in the Netherlands kept silent when the caretaker cabinet decided in February to stop intercountry adoptions . Consciously, says Sanne Buursink of the A New Way foundation, on behalf of all of them. Because if the Joustra Committee, whose investigation was the basis of that decision, had reason to believe that abuses such as tampering with documents and even child trafficking are still occurring, they first wanted to know exactly what the investigators were based on. “We work every day to do everything as carefully as possible,” explains Buursink. "But we thought, maybe we have a blind spot."

Yet the organizations are still speaking out strongly about the issue this week . They also find the additional information that the Joustra Committee sent to Minister Sander Dekker (legal protection) wafer thin this week.

The Joustra Committee gives some sixty examples which, according to the researchers, demonstrate that abuses still occur around intercountry adoptions. Why are you not convinced?

Buursink: “The sources cited by the Committee to substantiate that position often date from a completely different era. They relate to countries that at the time the abuse took place had not yet ratified the Hague adoption convention (an international convention in which stricter rules for intercountry adoptions have been established, ed.), But have now done so. Or they are not even related to the abuse to which the committee has linked them. ”

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When Xueli was a baby her parents left her on the ground outside an orphanage. In China, albinism is seen by some as a curse.

The rare genetic condition causes a lack of pigment which makes Xueli's skin and hair very pale and also makes her extremely sensitive to sunlight.

But looking different led Xueli to her modelling career. Now aged 16, she has graced the pages of Vogue and fronted campaigns for top designers.

This is her story as told to Jennifer Meierhans.

The staff at the orphanage named me Xue Li. Xue means snow and Li means beautiful. I was adopted when I was three and went to live with my mum and sister in the Netherlands. My mother said she could not think of a more perfect name and she thought it was important to keep a reference to my Chinese roots.

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) -A Croatian court has ruled that same-sex partners can now adopt children, backing a gay couple in their five-year fight for the right to family life, the government said on Thursday.

Zagreb’s Administrative Court ruled on April 21 that same-sex couples should not face discrimination in state adoption, the Rainbow Families Association (RFA), an LGBT+ group, said on its website, alongside a redacted copy of the judgment.

The head of the RFA, which funded the case, voiced excitement at this latest win for minority rights in the small Balkan state.

“I feel really relieved that this odyssey, that lasted so many years, has finally hit (its) conclusion,” Daniel Martinovic told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

He said the couple - Mladen Kozic and Ivo Segota - had only gone public with their victory after consulting the social worker of the two boys they look after, the first children to be fostered by a same-sex couple in Croatia.

A Bulgarian couple is in custody in Germany on suspicion of involvement in a human trafficking ring that allegedly brought pregnant women to Greece, where the babies were born and then sold to traffickers.

The 58-year-old man and his 51-year-old wife are suspected of having recruited at least nine poor pregnant women from Bulgaria to go to Greece as part of the trafficking operation, according to authorities in Germany. They were detained last week in Neunkirchen, a town near Germany's border with France.

Bulgarian authorities had issued a European arrest warrant for the couple, who are now in custody awaiting extradition.

They were indicted in February along with their son for "participation in an organized crime group for trade in newborn babies on the territory of Greece," Bulgarian prosecutors said in a statement on May 5. Their son is already under arrest in Bulgaria.

The three were accused of recruiting pregnant women from across Bulgaria to travel to neighboring Greece to give birth and sell their newborn babies to intermediaries for the equivalent of between $3,000 and $4,300. Mothers usually received only a fraction of the amount, with the larger portion pocketed by the traffickers.

NEW DELHI: The

has reached out to the ministry of health and family welfare in

the backdrop of reports regarding children orphaned due to

loss of parents to Covid-19 pandemic.

The has sought that a column may be added to