Thousands of children in Cambodia live in orphanages even though their parents are still alive. Some of the institutions exist solely to make money from tourists. Now, efforts are being made to reunite the families, but that is easier said than done.

Every morning at 6:30, the boys and girls of the Little Angels orphanage in Cambodia get to work, sitting at wooden tables set up in front of the entrance to ensure that passing tourists can't miss them.

For hours at a time, they use hammers and small chisels to punch holes in pieces of leather traced with delicate patterns. No one says a word as they work -- one of the boys has earbuds in his ears. The leather creations are traditionally used in Cambodia for shadow puppet shows, but here they serve as souvenirs for tourists. The larger works sell for as much as $700.

At around 11:00 a.m., a small tour bus stops on the dusty road in front of the orphanage. Little Angels is located not far from Angkor Wat, the World Heritage Site in Siem Reap Province, which attracted more than 2.5 million visitors last year.

Colorfully-dressed Chinese tourists pour out of the bus, drop some money into a transparent donation box, buy small heart-shaped leather pendants and give the children bags of candy. To show their gratitude, the youngsters line up and begin to sing songs, ending with the English-language classic: "You Raise Me Up." The tourists take pictures with their smartphones.

Santosh Garje, founder of an orphanage in Maharashtra’s Beed district, has been buying around 10,000 litres of water from private suppliers, at a cost of Rs 1,200 a day, since January 2018.

Santosh Garje, who runs an orphanage for 85-odd children in Maharashtra’s drought-hit Beed district, is going to sit on an indefinite hunger strike outside tehsildar’s office in Georai tehsil from Tuesday. Reason? Despite following up with the district administration for a year, the orphanage has still not got the water supply needed to fulfil its daily needs.

Garje has been buying around 10,000 litres of water from private suppliers, at a cost of Rs 1,200 a day, since January 2018. As the orphanage is run through public participation, spending more than Rs 36,000 a month only on water is no longer feasible.

Beed district collector M Devendra Singh said he had no idea about any such demand from the orphanage and arrangements can be done if they approach him.

Garje founded Sahara Anathalaya Parivar, an orphanage known as Balgram, in 2004, when he was 18.

High Court Judge Ngenye Macharia on Tuesday granted a request by the lawyer of Baby Kiano’s guardians to visit the child where he is being held so as to confirm he is alive and safe.

The judge further directed the lawyer not to disclose the location or the house where the child is being held.

“Applicant counsel to be accompanied by officers and Bernard Baraza from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) to the location where the child is being held tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2pm for purposes of confirming that the child is alive,” ruled the court.

The Attorney General has also since filed his response to the case saying the police took Baby Kiano and placed him under the care of the Child Welfare Society of Kenya, further rubbishing claims by the Mazzoncinis that the child is unwell.

“No medication is being administered to the child, who has been under special treatment,” the court heard.

Nairobi, Kenya (CNN)An American couple living in Nairobi, Kenya, is demanding answers after a 3-year-old boy in their custody, they say, was taken away by authorities last month without explanation.

Surveillance footage from April 5, obtained by CNN, shows two cars pull up to the Mazzoncinis' apartment complex and a group of people piling out. Shortly after, two women, their faces obscured by headscarves, can be seen carrying the boy downstairs and out of the building. That was the last time Matt and Daisy Mazzoncini saw Kiano, whom they say they've been caring for since he was 6 months old.

"I had just finished putting Kiano to bed and he had just fallen asleep and I walked out of his room and saw Matt's face and all these people and I just knew something was really wrong," Daisy told CNN. Kiano, who is Kenyan, was found as a newborn abandoned along with another baby believed to be his twin, according to a police report. The twin later died.

After receiving medical treatment, Kiano was taken to Mogra Children's Centre orphanage in Kiambu, Nairobi. Daisy met Kiano when she began volunteering at the orphanage in the summer of 2016, and she soon started helping to pay for his medical bills. As an infant, Kiano suffered from pneumonia and a chest deformity, according to Matt, but in 2018 was diagnosed with atypical febrile seizures, according to medical documents seen by CNN.

Daisy sitting by Kiano's bedside at the hospital. He has been treated multiple times for seizures. Daisy and her husband Matt were named Kiano's legal guardians by the Children's Court of Nairobi in April 2017. However, the order specified Kiano would not leave the jurisdiction of the court without the court's permission. But they say the plainclothes police that showed up at their home told them the guardianship order was fraudulent.

Welfare Ministry’s allocated state budget funding of EUR 619 000 was used, among other things, to pay bonuses to officials for obvious everyday tasks even though initially it was implied that employees of the ministry and State Child Protection Inspectorate (SCPI) would perform some specific tasks to prevent child and family abuse, as State Audit (SA) comments results of the 2018 financial audit.

When developing the 2018 state budget, Welfare Ministry outlined as a priority the programme On Enhancement of capacity for social-type institutions and social programmes for child rights protection. Accordingly, the ministry allocated funding of EUR 619 000 for these activities as well as IT system adaptation to help «assist child adoption and improve foster family care services». According to SA, the aforementioned amount was planned to pay employees in the ministry and SCPI.

In its audit SA concluded that only 6.6% of the allocated funding was used to pay employees for additional work. Mostly the money was used to pay different bonuses to employees from 13 of the ministry’s structural offices, including the Minister’s Office, State Secretary’s Office, Finance Management, structure fund and personnel department for employees, in which most are not involved in adoption and foster family care policy formation and implementation.

On top of that, funding was not used to pay bonuses for additional work. Most of the time, bonuses were paid for personal contribution and quality of work, payment of bonuses, as well as wages, vacation pay and vacation benefits, SA notes. For example, at least seven ministry workers have received bonus pay for cooperation with Plecs movement, which has worked in the last two years to ensure children do not end up in orphanages. Bonus pay was paid for management of problems identified by Plecs movement, opinion coordination, organization of regular meetings, as well as ensuring communication with Plecs movement for submission of proposals.

Additionally, ministry employees were paid bonuses for personal contribution and work quality, because increased intensity of work forced reorganization of the inspection in Stikli orphanage, compile results and discuss everything with the Ombudsman’s Bureau. SA auditors stress that Welfare Ministry only reacted when mass media reported information regarding significant violations at Stikli orphanage.

Policemen from the Warri area command in Delta State have arrested three suspects over the alleged child trafficking of a two-and-half-year-old baby girl.

Those arrested included, the matron of Divine Orphanage Home, Rosemary Johnson and Madam Rose IIogbo in Ughelli. The third person was a lady, who allegedly bought the child for N850,000 from Johnson and Ilogbo.

The arrest followed a petition by the president of Nigerian Child Welfare Fund, Comrade Joshua Omorere. Acting on the petition, detectives swung into action and arrested the suspects. The police also uncovered a baby-making factory in Agbor during the arrest.

IIogbo claimed she sold the child to one lady who had gone through adoption process in Ughelli. She also confessed that the matron of Divine Home Orphanage gave her another child to sell for N850,000 but people that were interested were offering N800,000, stressing that the matron of Divine Orphanage insisted it must be N850,000.

Meanwhile, a 50-year-old woman, Idowu Ademola, who allegedly specialized in trafficking foreigners for domestic services across the country, has been arrested by operatives of the Inspector General Police Intelligence Response Team (IRT), in Ibadan, Oyo State.

AHMEDABAD: In the case of a 39-year-old man who sought custody of his daughter from an orphanage in Nadiad, the orphanage on Thursday informed the Gujarat high court that the child had been given in adoption in January 2018.

The orphanage supplied a Nadiad sessions court’s order passed on January 2018 showing that the child was given in adoption to a Kolkata-based couple through Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA). Justice V P Patel questioned how a child, both of whose parents are alive, could be termed an orphan and be placed in the orphanage. To this, the court was told that the surrender of the child and her adoption took place in accordance with law.

The man had filed a habeas corpus petition in the HC for his 3-year-old daughter after the divorced mother surrendered the child in Matruchhaya Orphanage in Nadiad. While the man claimed that his estranged wife was avoiding him to evade the child custody issue, the woman and her father appeared before the court and told the court about harassment on part of the man, which led the mother to give up the child. Advocate Bhunesh Rupera, who appeared for the mother, submitted that the man was never interested in his daughter’s custody. At the time of divorce, he had retained the child’s custody, but returned the custody and signed an MoU stating that he would never claim custody in future. The lawyer submitted that the man was after his divorced wife and kept on pasting posters showing her as a missing person despite the fact that they separated through a mutual agreement. To get rid of him, the woman never furnished her address to courts. The mother refused to give her present address to the high court also claiming that it would result in harassment on part of her ex-husband. The 29-year-old woman and her father told the court that she started suffering from psychological problems because of the harassment. This led them to take a decision to put the child in an orphanage and give consent to give her in adoption. The HC has posted further hearing on June 25.

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Arguments of Amsterdam Court of Appeal of Adopting Child to Single Mother 'Selective' Court set aside law for non-existent right to adoption

The First Multiple Family Room of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal has lightly set aside the law. In fact, the chamber composed of the masters Willems-Morsink, De Vreeze-Oostvogel and Streefkerk has allowed the adoption by a single person to sabotage the law and manipulate it with human rights ....

From our reporter

Victor Lebesque

AMSTERDAM

The Namakkal adoption racket that is being investigated in Tamil Nadu has once again brought illegal adoptions to the spotlight. Investigating agencies believe at least 30 children had been sold by the gang behind the racket. The gang is alleged to have used gaps in health and registration services to target vulnerable families—poor, with several children, or several girl children—and persuade them to sell their babies to childless couples. They are alleged to have used contacts in government hospitals to locate such families. The families that gave up their children reportedly only received a small portion of what the childless couples paid for the child, the brokers pocketing most of it. It is reported that the families gave up their children only to ensure the kids got a better life.

That the circumstances of families in Tamil Nadu, one of the better-off states in India, remain such that they are willing to sell their babies to strangers should cause the state government to introspect and remedy gaps in its services, especially with regards to birth control and family planning. Adoption processes have been streamlined in recent years, but they do require prospective parents to be patient. The processes are not free of corruption although they are designed to protect the best interests of the child, to ensure that the kid ends up in a good and stable home. However, that illegal adoption remains rampant indicates that the legal process may need to be further streamlined without compromising the interests of the child. The government should also undertake more efforts to create awareness on the adoption process and make it accessible to all.

Meanwhile, childless couples should realise that even though legal adoption may take time, it is aimed at protecting the best interests of the child. By resorting to illegal adoption, they end up creating a demand that puts so many children at such horrific risk.

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The state government plans to maintain a centralised data on each child, his or her progress, education, medical history, and where the child’s file stands in adoption procedure. This will also include linkage with Aadhaar card.

In a bid to streamline the process of tracking an infant in government shelter homes, the state Women and Child Development (WCD) department will soon start digitising records of each child brought under its care, right from admission till adoption.

The state government plans to maintain a centralised data on each child, his or her progress, education, medical history, and where the child’s file stands in adoption procedure. This will also include linkage with Aadhaar card. Currently, very few shelter homes, both private and government, link admitted infants with Aadhaar, that too once the child turns five.

Officials with the WCD department said the data on orphans or abandoned children is mostly documented in hard copies in individual shelter homes without a standardised format. “The Juvenile Justice Act has a uniform procedure for each child. For instance, filling of Form 17 when child is produced before child welfare committee. All these legal requirements need to be streamlined and made available on a central database,” said Idzes Kundan, newly appointed WCD secretary.

Plans to boost foster care, where a child is placed with a family rather than a shelter home, are also underway. According to the Central Adoption Regional Agency (CARA), in 2016, foster care guidelines were amended under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2015. The central government introduced group foster care concept where a family could look after more than one child and look until their adoption. The government also allows foster family to adopt the infant if they look after him for at least five years.