ECLI: NL: RBNHO: 2018: 5426

Authority

District Court of North Holland

Date of judgment

27-06-2018

ECONOMYNEXT- A 47-year-old man arrested in Matale for allegedly maintaining ‘baby farms’ was released on conditional bail and two sureties worth Rs 200,000 each by the Moratuwa Magistrate’s court today, December 23.

The suspect was produced before the courts this morning on charges of child trafficking.

The suspect has been ordered to reappear before the Moratuwa Magistrate’s Court on 04 January next year.

According to Police Media Spokesman DIG Ajith Rohana, the suspect has contacted pregnant women who were the victims of rape and sexual abuse and had brought them to two places in Kaldemulla, Moratuwa where he had allegedly entered into an agreement with the pregnant women to sell their babies to third parties.

DIG Rohana said such trafficking of infants is called baby farms in other countries and according to section 360 of the Penal Code human trafficking is an offence, so the suspect will be charged under that as selling an unborn fetus is seen as human trafficking.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam—On Sept. 5, 2020, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner took off from South Korea’s Incheon International Airport en route to Vietnam. On board the repatriation flight VN409 were 403 Vietnamese citizens—including 41 unaccompanied babies, who were being sent back to the country without their parents.

Waiting at the Ho Chi Minh City airport for one of the babies was Nguyen Hoa My, who had set off at 2 a.m. that same morning from her home in northern Vietnam, in order to meet up with the flight from Seoul and retrieve her granddaughter.

The flight from South Korea was delayed by almost two hours. “Airport officials said the papers of two babies had gotten lost and there was a last-minute scramble to sort out the paperwork back in Seoul, which led to the delay,” Nguyen recalls. “I thought I would be able to see the baby immediately, but I was told I wouldn’t be allowed through. At that point, I didn’t yet know which quarantine center they were all heading to, but another grandmother received a tip-off and so we made our way over to Bau Bang together.”

Vietnam Evacuating 80,000 Tourists After Three COVID Cases

TAKING NO CHANCES

MAFIA expert Radu Nicolae thought he had heard it all before he sat down with convicted people traffickers in one of Romania’s toughest prisons.

But as he listened to a series of horrifying tales about parents handing over innocent children to pimps intent on selling their bodies in the UK, even he struggled to contain his disgust.

Romanian girls are bought and sold to be trafficked to the UK and forced into sex work - many are young teenagers

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Romanian girls are bought and sold to be trafficked to the UK and forced into sex work - many are young teenagersCredit: Getty Images - Getty

Dinja van Lankveld (39) is born in Sri Lanka and adopted by Dutch parents after six weeks, because her young mother cannot take care of her. Dinja was happy with her adoption for a long time, but she slowly changes her mind.

“It's all very vague, I don't really know who to trust,” she says about her contact with the adoption agency.

INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION

LINDA.nl spoke to Dinja in 2016 about a decision by the Council for the Application of Criminal Law and Youth Protection. They advised to prevent international adoption as much as possible and to first find housing for the children in their country of origin. At the time, Dinja understood the discussion, but she was especially happy with her adoption: "I have had many more opportunities than my brother and sisters who did grow up in Sri Lanka."

Now, four years later, she is still happy with these opportunities and the warm nest she ended up in. Yet she is not comfortable. Dinja: “I got love, money and opportunities here, certainly. The Netherlands feels like my home base, but so does Sri Lanka. I think I could also have been very happy in Sri Lanka, then many people would have been spared a lot of grief. I don't have a good connection with my roots, I miss the country. I also believe that it is never in the best interest of a child to take it away from family. ”

In the Netherlands, gay couples have been able to adopt children from abroad for over ten years, and foster children were already placed in the home of loved ones of the same sex in the last century. Adoption is still in its infancy in Catholic Croatia, or even in tiny baby shoes. But the first foster children have now been placed.

Gay couple has two foster children after a long and hard fight against the system, prejudice and discrimination. Thank you guys! ”, Writes a young Croat on social media.

Because it is indeed a special moment for the country. After a long legal battle, two foster children have been placed with a gay couple for the first time in Croatia. It is an important step for the gay community in predominantly Catholic Croatia, says Daniel Martinovic of the Rainbow Families interest group that released the news. In the eighties of the last century, foster children were already placed in the same-sex house in the Netherlands.

Now there is a shortage of foster parents in our country and more and more foster grandparents are called upon, such as foster grandmother Ilja, whose life has changed completely. She was recently even in the Etos to buy condoms. You can read her story here.

Gay rights Croatia

JUSTICE - It is an unusual case that the Draguignan court ruled this week. A woman in her forties was appearing for having abandoned the child she had just adopted in Congo.

"He was unmanageable." These are the words used by this Frenchwoman, originally from Fréjus, to explain her gesture, she who decided to abandon the child she had just adopted in Congo. Explanations which did not convince the Court of Draguignan (Var), which has just sentenced her to 10 months suspended imprisonment for "neglect of a minor" . The court also pronounced a ban on exercising a professional activity in contact with minors, thus depriving the accused of her current job of social worker in an educational action service in an open environment.

The case dates back to 2018. That year, the accused, in her forties, saw her application for adoption lead to an orphanage in Brazzaville. But after spending a week there with her child, the Frenchwoman changes her mind, believing that the little boy, aged eight, is out of control. She then decides to return to France without him. Except that in the meantime, the adoption process has indeed been ratified and the little boy is therefore now French.

A complaint is then filed. And two years later, facing the Draguignan court, the accused explained that for her the charges of "neglect" of a child did not hold, insofar as she left the child in the orphanage where he still growing up, and where his health and safety were assured.

Did you see, the white mother didn't want you "

For almost two decades, Helmut Sax has straddled the boundary between research and practice around anti-trafficking. He has long sat ‘on the inside’ of official international anti-trafficking bodies and yet is widely and publicly critical of the ways in which anti-trafficking efforts often fail. BTS caught up with him in the context of this twentieth anniversary debate.

Neil Howard (BTS): Helmut, you have nearly two decades of experience as both an anti-trafficker and a scholar of anti-trafficking. In this series, we’re looking at the concept of ‘exploitation’ and taking stock of where the field has gotten to in its fight against it. What’s your take on where the field is at?

Helmut Sax: The ultimate goal of anti-trafficking is not the prevention of trafficking, but the prevention of exploitation. Conceptually, trafficking should be regarded as no more than a preparatory act, something that creates or maintains situations of dependency which make people vulnerable to being exploited. The added value of making trafficking a criminal offence is precisely that it enables us to address these situations – what I call the ‘logistics’ of dependency. But doing so means working much more closely with wider efforts to end exploitation. For example, when it comes to supply chains, we shouldn’t just be focussing on monitoring but instead need to address poor working conditions, weak labour rights, and all the underlying cause factors that lead to a need for monitoring in the first place.

Neil: So why is that not happening?

Helmut: Ironically, it’s partly attributable to the fact that, as a criminal offence, trafficking is typically addressed through the criminal justice system. This leads to a heavy emphasis on investigation, arrest, and prosecution, with the obvious consequence that individual criminals are targeted instead of the exploitative circumstances in which they operate. In practice, this sees states work hard to increase their numbers of trafficking investigations and convictions, but their actual focus really should be on addressing exploitation.

Nagpur, Dec 16 (PTI) Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh and his wife will perform the ''kanyadaan'', ritual of offering daughter''s hand to groom in marriage, of an orphan and speech and hearing impaired bride in Nagpur on Sunday.

Nagpur Collector Ravindra Thakre and his wife will will perform the father''s duty for the groom, who is also an orphan and suffers from the same disabilities, according to a release issued by the district information office.

The woman, aged 23, was found abandoned at a railway station in Nagpur 23 years back, and was adopted and raised by social worker Shankarbaba Papalkar at his orphanage in the state''s Amravati district, the release said.

The 27-year-old man was found abandoned in Dombivali town of Thane district when he was two years'' old. He was also adopted and brought up by Papalkar at his orphanage.

Their wedding will be held on December 20.

A forum of mostly Catholic nuns has demanded equal treatment for priests and nuns, citing the case of a priest continuing in ministry after fathering a child with a nun who has been dismissed from her congregation.

In a letter to the top Catholic hierarchy, Sisters in Solidarity said the Church has been following a "double standard" by dismissing the nun after she became pregnant.

When priests violate the vow of celibacy, "they are merely relocated to another diocese" but when nuns face a similar situation, "they are compelled to leave their congregations," said the Dec. 16 letter titled "A wake-up call to greater integrity."

The letter was sent to Cardinal Oswald Gracias, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, Cardinal George Alencherry, major archbishop and head of the Syro-Malabar Church based in the southern state of Kerala, and other top officials.

The letter referred to Syro-Malabar Thamarassery Diocese transferring Father Jomon Kandathinkara to Shamshabad Diocese in Telangana state five years ago after diocesan officials came to know that he had fathered a baby girl with a Franciscan Clarist nun.