There is a lot of controversy on this topic, but finally the coalition agrees on a compromise that should anchor the rights of children in the Basic Law. The change in the law is now being passed through the Federal Cabinet. But she could fail at the next hurdle.

The federal government wants to strengthen the rights of children and has initiated an amendment to the Basic Law. The federal cabinet decided in Berlin that children's rights should be expressly included in the constitution. However, it is uncertain whether the project will result in anything, because two-thirds majorities in the Bundestag and Bundesrat are necessary for amendments to the Basic Law.

The grand coalition is therefore dependent on the approval of the opposition, which has already expressed itself critically - either because the project goes too far or not enough for it. "Children are not little adults. They are particularly vulnerable and have special needs," said Federal Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht.

Anchoring in the Basic Law

Children are demanding more rights in front of the Bundestag

Numerous news outlets and activist groups in India have reported an increase in trafficking, bonded labour, and slave-like working conditions in the past weeks. The two main stories were the rescue of young boys from a basement bangle factory in Rajasthan and Gujarat and the rescue of young girls from sex work and domestic servitude. Instead of seeing increases in trafficked and coerced labour as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown imposed in March, I suggest that it is located in a longer story of labour’s weakening position vis-a-vis their employers and the erosion of their existing rights. The pandemic and the lockdown did not create the conditions for the subjection of labour or for trafficking. They deepened existing asymmetries.

The popular view of the ‘India success story’ is that of sustained high growth rates on the one hand and record reductions in absolute poverty on the other. But in fact high growth was delivered on the backs on hyper-exploitation of ‘informal’ and ‘migrant’ labour, which has been “ground down by growth”. India has also relied heavily on the large-scale transfer of land ownership and the hyper-exploitation of nature. Successive governments have pursued the strategy of making ‘cheap land’ and ‘cheap nature’, along with ‘cheap labour’, available to capitalists, which has produced a steady stream of workers away from affected rural areas to the cities.

Factors other than the effects of economic policy also bear on the conditions of labour. Climate events leading to drought or flood, for example, have pushed people into hyper-exploitative labour relations and work conditions. The simple fact of too little or too much rain has helped fuel pockets of extreme deprivation – in Bihar, Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Uttar Pradesh in particular – which are the main sources of trafficking and coerced labour in India. Wage theft by employers, poor enforcement and understanding of rights, the presence of extremely coercive work conditions, violence with impunity against workers – all are endemic to this milieu.

Rightlessness, wage theft, and precarity made plain by the pandemic

That migrant workers overwhelmingly come from poor, rural families with no or little land was well established before the pandemic. In 2018, the 56% of the rural population was landless. A UN report found that India had the largest number of people – 364 million – facing multidimensional poverty. Of those, 113 million – 8.6% of the population – were classified as extremely poor. At the same time, a sharply increasing number of people from rural areas have been displaced by changes in land laws that allow for the reclassification of agricultural land, opening it up for other purposes. Workers enter labour markets from a position of dispossession and desperation, which the pandemic intensified.

MUMBAI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Police in Mumbai have charged nine alleged members of a baby-trafficking ring - among them a nurse at a maternity hospital and agents who operated in the impoverished slums of India’s financial capital, officials said on Monday.

In the second such case in the city in five years, the nine are accused of having bought and sold at least seven babies over a six-year period.

The mothers of three infants and a man who had bought a baby were also arrested in a four-day police operation.

“We’re now investigating how many more children have they sold and if there are more agents operating in the area,” said police inspector Yogesh Chavan, who received a tip-off about the baby-trafficking racket last week.

“The mothers of the babies were poor and the buyers were couples desperate for a child,” he said.

PHOENIX -- A former Arizona politician must report to prison Thursday to begin serving the first of three sentences for running an illegal adoption scheme that paid pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to come to the U.S. to give up their babies.

Paul Petersen, a Republican who served as Maricopa County assessor for six years and also worked as an adoption attorney, was sentenced to six years after pleading guilty in federal court in Arkansas to conspiring to commit human smuggling.

Petersen, who has acknowledged running the adoption scheme, is awaiting sentencing in state courts in Arizona for fraud convictions and in Utah for human smuggling and other convictions. Sentencing dates have not yet been set for those cases.

Prosecutors have said Petersen illegally paid women from the Pacific island nation to give up their babies in at least 70 adoption cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas. Marshall Islands citizens have been prohibited from traveling to the U.S. for adoption purposes since 2003.

Petersen’s attorney, Kurt Altman, did not immediately respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.

Children’s rights groups in South Korea have condemned comments by President Moon Jae-in suggesting that adoptive parents who do not get along with a child should be able to “change” it for another one.

Mr Moon was responding to a question at a press conference on Monday about the government’s efforts to prevent child abuse in light of the death late last year of a 16-month-old girl, allegedly at the hands of her adoptive parents.

The case has provoked outrage in South Korea, with the adopted mother of Jung-in charged with murder on January 13. The woman, identified only by her family name, Jang, was originally charged with fatal child abuse and neglect in December.

Commenting on the case, Mr Moon said, “Even after adoption, the adoptive parents need to check if the adoption is working out for them. So there should be measures allowing them to cancel the adoption or, if they still want to adopt a child, then they should be able to change the child."

The press conference, which was being broadcast live on national television, triggered an immediate response, with critics saying the president was suggesting that children were “goods” that could be returned for a refund.

Geographical distance does not dim the huge emotion contained in the pages of the Report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission, and the responses of survivors, residents, and their families.

Out of deeply held respect for survivors and their families, I wanted to hear these most powerful of voices before commenting.

The State holds much of the responsibility. There are actions of reparation which must be done and be rooted in the fundamental belief of the equal human rights of all people.

This must include an urgency around adoption legislation grounded in adopted people’s unequivocal human right to their identity.

The complex legal and political background on this issue is worth reflecting on as it could lead to informed decisions now.

Last week we were informed that one of the birth parents we tested had died. While most of the birth families we have met are between 30 and 60 years old, as time moves on the number of birth parents passing away will only increase. It is time that the adoption community collectively begins to take searching seriously, and take steps to maximize the efficiency of our collective efforts. Today, the searching has been by-and-large a collection of single efforts to locate specific birth families, with each adoptee and their family expending valuable time and efforts for their own search, with little attention being paid to the needs and success of the community as a whole. This must change. This essay is written with the desire to reframe the search efforts of everyone searching in China. The goal is for all of us to work so that the maximum number of birth families can be reunited with the largest number of adoptees, including our own.

The following essay was originally given in the 2015 Heritage Camp of adoptees and their parents in Colorado. It is hoped that the steps presented here will help any family in their search.

____________________________

The idea of searching for our child's birth family is fraught with all kinds of emotional and financial currents. What will happen if we are successful? How much will it cost? Should I conduct a search before my child expresses an interest in searching? While most of the answers will depend on variables unique to each situation, some basic foundational principles nevertheless apply to all searches. I have composed a list of ten commandments that everyone should consider before beginning a search. These commandments are largely chronological, in that the early commandments address concerns at the beginning of a search, and later commandments address issues that arise in a search itself. While targeting the adoptive parents as the primary audience, adoptees are also an important component and can easily place themselves into the intended readers.

Put Aside Your Own Fears

When I found out that I’m getting adopted to another family, I didn’t understand what they meant. Few days later Amma, who was the head of the hostel, said that my sisters and I were going to meet our new mom. I understood then that I was getting a family. I wasn’t excited to meet my new family, but I just pretended to be because I didn’t want them to think that I was not happy to see them.

One April afternoon, we left to meet our new mom. I was nervous. When we arrived, I saw a woman wearing a beautiful saree. She came towards us and I said, “Hi Ma’am.” She smiled. Then I said “Mom?” She said yes. She introduced herself, “Namaste, I am Rama, your new mom.” She sounded friendly. However, because she was wearing glasses and had short hair, I was afraid that she may be strict. She reminded me of a woman I knew who was very mean to everyone in the first hostel we stayed at.

When we went to a separate room to talk, our new mom asked, “What do you like to do?” I said, “I like to play with the kitchen set.” I used to love to pretend play. It was so much fun to cook, pretend to be a parent and send kids to school. Our new mom got a delicious biscuit which we all shared and talked about other things for a while. She asked us about the things we don’t like, and I replied, “I don’t like it when adults fight.” I don’t think any kid likes it when their parents fight. They get scared and sometimes, it becomes traumatic and haunts them for the rest of their lives.

Sometime later, she showed us her husband’s photo. We were shocked! My sisters and I had never ever seen a white man or woman in our lives and there he was in the picture!

I imagined his whole family looking white, it was like he had put so much powder on his face; that’s what some people do in India. I asked our new mom, “When are we going with you?” I wanted to make sure how much time I had with my friends in the hostel. She answered, “As soon as the paperwork is done.” We had a good time talking and sharing things about our lives. I felt happy because she wanted to know about my life, my likes, and dislikes.

It is one of the comparatively unknown chapters of the National Socialist dictatorship: in several European countries the SS had children stolen in order to have them "Germanized" in the care of the so-called Lebensborn Association. Thousands of families were affected by this brutal policy of "Germanization", many of the children still do not know their true origins.

DISPLAY

Those affected who are still alive are not officially recognized as victims of Nazi tyranny in Germany . But that should finally change - if it is up to the will of children who were abducted: The association »Robbery Children - Forgotten Children« from Freiburg is now calling in a letter to members of the Bundestag that »Lebensborn« children are legally victims of National Socialism to acknowledge.

According to the letter that is available to SPIEGEL, this should go hand in hand with a claim for compensation for those who were once abducted. Anyone who is officially a victim of the first German dictatorship in Germany can receive benefits according to the so-called guidelines on hardship payments to victims of National Socialist injustice.

ANZEIGE

MUMBAI: The city crime branch busted a baby-selling racket with the arrest of eight people, including a pathology lab technician.

Accordingly to the police, the accused would approach new mothers from economically weaker sections and offer to facilitate the ‘adoption’ of their babies for a price—Rs 60,000 for a newborn girl, and Rs 1.5 lakh for a boy. Preliminary investigations indicate that the gang sold four babies in the last six months, but the police suspect the number could be much higher.

Among those arrested on Saturday were Arti Singh, Rupali Verma, Rukshar Shaikh, Nisha Ahire, Heena Khan, Geetanjali Gaikwad, Shahjahan Jogilkar, and Sanjay Padam. Singh, a lab technician, and Verma were ‘agents’, while Khan and Ahire were ‘sub-agents’ in the baby-selling racket.

The police seized eight mobile phones from the accused. They hope to trace the babies sold to families in Mumbai and Pune from the photographs and WhatsApp chats retrieved from the phones.

The police have also sought the call detail records of the arrested accused, who have been booked under the Indian Penal Code sections of human trafficking and the Juvenile Justice Act.