Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani took to Twitter to flag adoption requests as illegal and urged people to prevent trafficking in the garb of adoption and report all such cases to 1098 or police or a Child Welfare Committee.

In Odisha’s Ganjam district, a 45-day-old girl was found next to her mother’s body, when neighbours broke open the door of their house in Golapalli village. Suspecting it to be a case of death due to COVID-19, the local police sent the corpse for post-mortem and contacted the centre in-charge for Childline 1098, the national helpline for children, to arrange help for the toddler.

In Delhi, a mother left two daughters, a 15-year-old and a seven-year-old, with her neighbours before getting admitted in a hospital and losing her battle against the pandemic.

In Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad, COVID-19 dealt a cruel blow and claimed the lives of four members of a family over 12 days, leaving behind two daughters aged six and 10.

“I will not send the girls to any institution, I will raise them,” said Anil Kumar (name changed), their paternal uncle. “It is what their father wished. Just two days before his death, he kept asking us to look after them if something happened to him. Earlier, too, on several occasions he had raised this issue,” Mr. Kumar adds.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development issued a notice on Monday urging the general public to “refrain’’ from circulating messages on social media for the adoption of children who have been orphaned due to Covid-19.

Raising concerns that such unregulated “adoptions” could even lead to child trafficking, the ministry had earlier written to states asking them to monitor such activity and also ensure that such orphaned children be produced before District Child Welfare Committees. The Ministry has since issued such alerts regarding the matter on several instances.

In the public notice issued today, the ministry had said, “…If any child is found to have lost parents to Covid, with no one to look after them, the child ought to be produced before the District Child Welfare Committee within 24 hours.” The notice also said that information regarding such children could be shared on the child helpline – 1098.

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Every international adoption in British Columbia is provided through an adoption agency — the external review will probe how adoption agencies are licensed and monitored, as well as how international adoptions are carried out.

The B.C. government is calling for an external review to assess how inter-country adoptions are carried out.

With every international adoption in British Columbia provided through an adoption agency, the external review will also be tasked with probing how adoption agencies are licensed and monitored.

“Over the past decade, international adoptions have decreased, as more countries are choosing to keep their children within their own borders and closer to their home culture,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

At the moment, adoption agencies manage their own funding, metrics for success and operating decisions. When it comes to licensing, the provincial director of adoptions runs them through a three-year process consulting on complex cases, reviewing closed files and investigating complaints.

Colombia has opened its doors to adoption by Maltese same-sex couples, giving them a second option to adopt internationally.

The civil unions law gives local same-sex couples the same rights as in marriage, including the right to adopt, with the first such adoption taking place in 2016.

Until now, same-sex couples could only adopt children from Portugal.

Meanwhile, Ghana has joined the list of countries open to Malta for adoptions by newly-weds, since it will not require prospective parents to be married for any length of time before adopting.

Prior to the addition of these two countries to the list, the Maltese were able to adopt from six countries: Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria, India, Vietnam and the Philippines.

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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