Madras High Court

Helen Anitha vs The Inspector Of Police on 10 October, 2018

BEFORE THE MADURAI BENCH OF MADRAS HIGH COURT

Dated: 10.10.2018

ORDERS RESERVED ON : 08.10.2018

Decree of the Minister for Legal Protection of 30 November 2020, no.3114150, establishing a Committee of independent experts on the investigation of domestic distance and adoption (Decree Establishing the Committee of Independent Experts on Domestic Distance and Adoption)

The Minister for Legal Protection,

In view of Section 2, subsection 1, of the Advisory Boards and Committees Remuneration Act;

Decision:

Article 1 Definitions

THE OIREACHTAS CHILDREN’S Committee is set to invite the chairperson of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes to appear before it.

The committee made the decision at a private meeting yesterday and plans to send a letter to Judge Yvonne Murphy, the chair of the three-person commission, in the coming days.

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman, whose department oversaw the release of the report, will be invited to attend a separate meeting with the committee.

Survivors will also be asked to attend another hearing so they can raise any questions or concerns they have.

The report, spanning 2,865 pages, details the experiences of women and children who lived in 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes between 1922 and 1998. It was published on 12 January, nearly six years after the commission was first set up.

MUMBAI: A city couple on Friday alleged the child welfare committee (CWC) took away their “adopted” infant and kept her in “illegal detention”. They have sought orders to be reunited with the baby, now aged two.

The childless couple said they had adopted a newborn from a single woman under provisions of Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act (HAMA) through an adoption deed in January 2019. That June, CWC filed a criminal case against them and “immediately took” the child from their legal custody, they alleged. Currently, the child is being looked after by a trust that runs a “specialised adoption agency”, said their petition.

CWC is a statutory body set up under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection ) Act as an authority to deal with children in care of protection. The petition alleged CWC has acted “arbitrarily” and “high-handedly” out of “mere ignorance of law” six months after the child was “adopted”. Parting the child has deprived her of her fundamental right to life as well as “love and affection of the adoptive parents,’’ said the couple.

The couple filed a habeas corpus petition (to seek production of somebody from illegal detention or custody) through advocate Siddharth Jagushte and senior counsel Raja Thakare. The advocates mentioned it before a Bombay high court bench of Justices S S Shinde and Manish Pitale at a virtual hearing on Friday. The biological mother, represented by advocate Tusshar Nirbhavane, used to work as a domestic help and had entered into the ‘adoption deed’’, is the contention. The couple said they performed a handing over ceremony for the child.

Thakare said two important legal questions are involved, including whether adoption under HAMA can be “trifled with’’ when JJ Act recognises it and if Section 80 can be invoked when a valid adoption deed exists.

The Supreme Court on Thursday adjourned hearing on a petition filed by Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay seeking removal of anomalies in the grounds of adoption and guardianship and making them uniform for all citizens.

The matter was listed before the bench headed by the Chief Justice S.A. Bobde. The Court told the petitioner’s lawyer that a similar matter was dismissed in 2019. The Court asked petitioner to refer to that order and come back next week. Senior Advocate Anjana Prakash appeared for the petitioner. The matter will be considered next week.

The Court has directed to list the matter next week along with record of Writ Petition (Civil) No. 598 of 2019. Justice A.S. Bopanna and Justice V. Ramasubramanian were also part of the bench who passed the order.

The petition has been filed by BJP leader and spokesperson Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, who sought directions to declare the grounds of adoption and guardianship under different acts based on different religions per se as discriminatory.

The petitioner has submitted that Several acts such as Juvenile Justice Act, 2000, Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, The Guardians and Wards Act 1890, Hindu Minority and Guardianship act and personal laws of Muslims Christians and Parasis contain different provisions for adoption and guardianship, which are against gender equality, dignity of women and children.

The Supreme Court on Thursday adjourned hearing on a petition filed by Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay seeking removal of anomalies in the grounds of adoption and guardianship and making them uniform for all citizens.

The matter was listed before the bench headed by the Chief Justice S.A. Bobde. The Court told the petitioner’s lawyer that a similar matter was dismissed in 2019. The Court asked petitioner to refer to that order and come back next week. Senior Advocate Anjana Prakash appeared for the petitioner. The matter will be considered next week.

The Court has directed to list the matter next week along with record of Writ Petition (Civil) No. 598 of 2019. Justice A.S. Bopanna and Justice V. Ramasubramanian were also part of the bench who passed the order.

The petition has been filed by BJP leader and spokesperson Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, who sought directions to declare the grounds of adoption and guardianship under different acts based on different religions per se as discriminatory.

The petitioner has submitted that Several acts such as Juvenile Justice Act, 2000, Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, The Guardians and Wards Act 1890, Hindu Minority and Guardianship act and personal laws of Muslims Christians and Parasis contain different provisions for adoption and guardianship, which are against gender equality, dignity of women and children.

For several weeks in 1907, the Australian public was gripped by a sensational trial in Perth that exposed the dark practice of baby farming.

While it was a trial over the death of one infant, proceedings revealed that 37 babies had died in the care of one woman, Alice Mitchell, over a six-year period, leading to headlines suggesting she might be Australia's worst serial killer.

This extraordinary, but now largely forgotten, case is explored in the book The Edward Street Baby Farm by Perth author Stella Budrikis, who stumbled upon the term while researching another book.

'Baby farming' for profit

"I'd never heard of baby farming until I was writing a book about my great-great-grandmother who became a single mother in Adelaide in the 1860s," Dr Budrikis told Geoff Hutchison on ABC Radio Perth.

THE ARCHBISHOPS OF the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland have expressed shame over mother and baby homes.

More than 10,000 women and girls entered institutions for unmarried mothers across Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1990, and a report has revealed claims of inappropriate labour and being stigmatised at the homes, run by Catholic orders and Protestant clergy.

A “victim-centred” independent investigation was ordered by Stormont ministers and should be completed within six months.

The Bishop of Derry, Donal McKeown, said all historic records from the homes should be released in full.

“If anyone is trying to hide records or destroy records, that is a crime. Of course there is no reason why records should be withheld because people want to know who they are,” McKeown told the BBC.

An alleged baby trafficking syndicate has been busted by the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) and the Medical and Dental Council after an investigation.

According to the Executive Director of EOCO, Frank Adu Poku, the buying and selling of babies has been on the radar of the crime office for a while and has so far resulted in the arrested of at least 10 suspects.

These suspects are said to be doctors, nurses, social welfare workers, traditional birth attendants and mothers who operated in various hospitals in the Greater Accra Region.

“Medical and Dental Council and Economic and Organised Crime Office have been investigating the activities of some medical practitioners and other individuals who were suspected to be engaging in an illegal act of baby harvesting and human trafficking.

“As a result of this investigation, two doctors, four nurses, two social welfare workers, a traditional birth attendant and two mothers have been arrested so far,” he stated.

For as long as she can remember, Maria Diemar has known she was adopted. Her Swedish parents were always open about her Chilean heritage, and growing up in Stockholm in the 1970s and 80s with brown skin and dark hair, it was impossible not to notice she was different.

When she was 11, Diemar’s parents showed her the papers that arrived with her in Sweden as a two-month-old baby in 1975. The file on her parentage offered a brief, unflattering portrait of a teenage mother who sent her newborn girl to be raised by strangers on the other side of the world. “They said she was a live-in maid, that she had a son who lived with her parents, and that she was poor,” recalled Diemar.

In her mid-20s, Diemar went looking for her mother. She contacted the Adoption Centre, the Swedish NGO that had organised her adoption. Sweden has one of the highest per-capita international adoption rates in the world, and in the 90s, the agency had launched a programme that helped adoptees reunite with their biological families. But they had no information on Diemar’s mother.

In 1998, she flew to Chile, requesting help from various sources: child welfare services, the family court that approved her adoption, the hospital where she was born, the civil registry. But none of them provided any information. When she visited the courthouse in Temuco, the nearest city to her birthplace, a court clerk stood in front of her, holding her file in hand, leafing through the ageing papers, and refused to give her so much as a peek. She left Chile empty-handed, but still determined to find her mother. “I came home with more questions,” Diemar said, “but I felt I had got closer to my family. I just needed to find them.”

A few years later, in the winter of 2002, Diemar heard about a Swedish TV documentary series that featured two adoptees searching for their biological families in Chile. Shortly before, Diemar had been given a promising lead: Chile’s National Children’s Service had come up with a possible address for her mother. Seizing on this new possibility, Diemar contacted Ana Maria Olivares, a Chilean journalist who had contributed to the documentary, to ask for help.