The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected Thursday, September 7 the request of two people born from PMA who asked France for access to their origins and in particular to medical data on their parent.

In its judgment, the Court considers that the “refusal to disclose data relating to gamete donors to applicants born from an MAP does not breach Article 8 of the Convention”on the right to respect for private and family life.

The case opposed, since 2018, Audrey Gauvin-Fournis and Clément Silliau, born in the 1980s with a third-party donor, to the French State for a refusal of access to information on their respective parents.

“Legislative choice”

According to the Court, “the situation denounced by the applicant and the applicant stems from the choices of the
legislator ». Indeed, the lifting of anonymity for donors only dates back to September 2022, when the bioethics law came into force, with a new mechanism for access to origins, subject however to the donors’ consent.

Under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, thousands of Chilean children were adopted abroad without the consent of their biological families. A sprawling affair, which has occupied Chilean justice since 2018.

SantiagoSantiago(Chile).– It is a long tremor that is shaking Chile, a country that has been accustomed to earthquakes for almost ten years. The first shock dates back to April 19, 2014, when the independent media Ciper revealed the illicit adoptions of several children born in the 1980s. The facts reported in the article occurred in Santiago. In several hospitals in the capital, doctors declared dead around ten newborns, in reality given up for adoption, through a priest.

Stop pointing fingers at the government and take joint responsibility for the success of youth care. Tom van Yperen makes this call to the youth field. On Thursday, November 16, the educationalist and expert on the quality of the youth system will deliver the twelfth edition of the annual Mulock Houwer lecture at the Netherlands Youth Institute.

Innovation in youth care has been necessary for decades. At the end of the last century, Mulock Houwer made proposals that are still relevant today. Such as his plea to work more on an outpatient basis with families and to phase out residential care. Why is it that we are still struggling with the same problems more than 50 years later? According to Van Yperen, things often go wrong as soon as a good idea is converted into legislation. The parties involved tinker with the content so much that in the end there is little left of it.

Critical, but hopeful

Can youth care actually change? Van Yperen is looking for an answer to that question. He is critical, but hopeful. Van Yperen draws hope from the unique collaboration for the Reform Agenda. Let this be the starting point for shared responsibility, he argues.

His criticism is aimed at the policy focus in the sector. Not the reform itself, but the major social youth issues should be central. Such as the increasing use of youth care and the decline in the mental well-being of young people. These require broad, social solutions.

Safeguarding search for origins from illicit post-adoption practices

Adoptees who want to discover their original identity are forced to turn to a program such as Spoorloos . They have nowhere else to go. There should be legal provisions regulating access to the right to identity of adoptees.

Four victims of the TV program Spoorloos want compensation from KRO-NCRV because the editors provided them with false information about their original identity. Since the late 1960s, more than 40,000 people from approximately eighty different countries have lost their original identity through intercountry adoption to the Netherlands. 1

Since 1990, Spoorloos has focused on these adoptees. The editors promise them a 'match' with their original family, in order to entertain the audience and generate viewing figures. Spoorloos confronts adoptees on television with lost family, deprived identity and their deepest pain.

By participating in Spoorloos , adoptees relinquish their right to privacy in exchange for a possible match with their original family. This also concerns false matches, as became clear after research into the TV program Oplichters tackled in 2022.

Adoptees are forced to turn to Spoorloos because they have insufficient resources and support to discover their original identity themselves. That is inherent to intercountry adoption. Adoptees cannot go anywhere else, not even at the recently established expertise center for intercountry adoption (INEA).

The Acceptability of Surrogacy

Whose recourse to surrogacy is accepted socially and whose is frowned upon, or even legally prohibited, is a chequered terrain. Popular stereotypes have seeped into policymaking, even as social ways of family-making go beyond conventional usages of reproductive technologies.

Surrogacy is now a legitimate mode of reproduction, at least as far as heterosexual married couples, or single individuals are concerned. News of celebrities having children via surrogacy – be it Shahrukh Khan or Amir Khan a decade ago, or more recently Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nayanthara – has contributed to this ‘mainstreaming’ of surrogacy. Popular culture representations in films and other forms of content on OTT platforms also reflect this mainstreaming.

Surrogacy arrangements are located in the milieu of infertility and other physiological conditions that might prevent carrying a pregnancy. Like in the case of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs), anxieties and changing perceptions about understanding infertility have contributed to a deepening of their social acceptance. Other than these conditions, single individuals and queer couples have also found surrogacy as a viable mode of having their ‘own’ child(ren). In their context, using ARTs and surrogacy facilitates something that biology renders unattainable. 

The sensationalist attention towards the process and its consequent social acceptance piggybacks on a laudatory view of technological assistance in case of ‘infertility’, often presented as a ‘treatment’ for a ‘disease’. A growing fertility treatment industry in the private sector, that resorts to aggressive marketing and advertising, has mediated the changing understanding of childlessness from a social condition stigmatised in a patriarchal context to its perception as a disease that can be treated medically, as I have argued elsewhere. In this context, the public health expert Imrana Qadeer insightfully observes that “least sensitive cultural norms that contribute to women’s anxieties, medicalisation of her life and professional control of her reproduction” are all important axes through which one can analyse “the commercialisation of infertility” (2010: 16). 

Over 11 years after a 5-year-old was kidnapped in Bihar’s Siwan district, the Patna High Court recently ordered the State Crime Investigation Department (CID) to re-investigate the case and recover the minor child. [Mansur Alam Versus The State of Bihar]

Justice Anil Kumar Sinha said the local police had not investigated the case scientifically or with the desired sensitivity, forcing the victim’s father to approach the Court in March 2021.

The Court noted that the investigating officers in the case were frequently changed and that the officers appeared to have investigated the case in a piece-meal manner. The judge remarked that even directions issued by the supervising officers were not followed.

Criticising the senior officers for not forming a special team to recover the child, the Court opined that no serious effort were made by the Superintendent of Police and other higher-ranked police officers.

The Halle-Vilvoorde court has been investigating the murder of a 68-year-old woman from Steenokkerzeel in Flemish Brabant for two months. The facts date from the night of July 11 to 12, but are only now coming to light. The woman, Brigitte Vanaudenraeren, was found lifeless in her home along the Tervuursesteenweg. It soon became apparent that there was more going on. “It is a case of parricide,” prosecutor's office spokesman Gilles Blondeau confirmed on Monday.

Council chamber

The woman's home is directly opposite the police station. Just after the events last summer, we hear from a good source, Thalia D., the 35-year-old adoptive daughter, was arrested. This after indications that she had done “something” to her adoptive mother.

“In the interest of the investigation, no further communication about the case can be made at this time,” it said. The suspect, according to our information from El Salvador, appeared last week before the council chamber in Brussels, which decided to extend her detention for at least a month. Thalia D.'s lawyer declined to comment on Monday. There appears to be no discussion in investigative circles about the perpetrator. In the meantime, the investigation into the facts continues. The motive for the parricide remains a mystery for now. (cds/cvh/phu)

Only the human imagination sets limits to what can happen here, says a report written by the Norwegian authorities in 2009. Nevertheless, adoptions continued as before.

• Brazil, 2009: Children tried to be sold for adoption. Mother sells her child for a pair of sandals. 
• Colombia, 2017 : Thousands of children disappear from their parents - and are vulnerable to illegal adoption. Children used for prostitution and human trafficking. 
• Philippines, 2010 : New identity can be obtained on most street corners.

These are alerts Bufdir has received on inspection trips .

In Brazil, a public prosecutor told the children's court about corruption and the buying and selling of children, before saying that only the imagination set limits to what could happen in the country. 

This is revealed in the report Bufdir wrote after the trip in 2009. 

https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/Kn9pyM/vg-avsloerer-slik-ble-norge-varslet-om-salg-av-barn-korrupsjon-og-falske-identiteter?fbclid=IwAR1FO_rvtYRAkjAyXPXUhfI-jdth574nl64P9VCpm427TvSGifXU5dsj7cw_aem_ATcUAPBhNjs_MbfkMvmDknp60siZJNZsWhgFJr2Wk_Sg1VMy4yKtsi_hIZ0w64AWDAY&mibextid=S66gvF

Only the human imagination sets limits to what can happen here, says a report written by the Norwegian authorities in 2009. Nevertheless, adoptions continued as before.

The short version