Former Lazard Banker’s Home Raided in Rio Tinto Probe

By Franz Wild and Thomas Biesheuvel

15 March 2018, 12:21 CET Updated on 15 March 2018, 15:43 CET

SFO led raid on Francois de Combret’s home late last year

Friend of Guinean president, de Combret helped on Rio deal

Communication on the rights of the child

(Item for adoption)

- President Barroso welcomed the fact that this important initiative had returned to the

Group’s agenda for a final political steer, before being addressed as a common initiative

to the Commission for adoption on 4 July. He thanked VP Frattini, all the Members of

On February 9, a senior judge of the Bombay High Court, Justice Sadhana Jadhav, passed an order expunging the comments she herself had made last month while granting bail to a man accused of sexually abusing his minor adopted daughter. The order read:

“The last four lines of paragraph [4] of the order passed on January 16, 2017, which stand expunged with the above clarification are as follows:

She has admitted that she used to do all dirty things. It appears that she was inherently abnormal and had sexual instinct from her childhood, in all probabilities because of the environment and atmosphere in which she lived and because of the conduct of her mother.”

The matter was taken up for hearing on an urgent application made by the police to expunge the comments passed by the judge. Beneath this short order lies the history of humiliation a rape victim is constantly subjected to during court proceedings, despite the vibrant anti-rape movement in the country in the last three-and-a-half decades.

The accused was represented by a reputed criminal lawyer and it is quite obvious that documents – including a letter written by the child to the supervisor of her shelter home at the time of her adoption – that formed the chargesheet were brought to the notice of the judge by him. It is also likely that the additional public prosecutor did not strongly object that the document had no bearing on the case and was incriminatory. What is shocking is that the judge made her comments in an open court, which were then reported in newspapers.

How some foreigners sneak out children By Sunday Standard Reporter | Published Sun, June 17th 2018 at 00:00, Updated June 16th 2018 at 21:43 GMT +3 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Foreigners with guardianship orders over Kenyan children have been spiriting them away under the guise of seeking medical attention, a new report on child trafficking says. Courts and children officers have also been cited as facilitators of this form of child trafficking done in defiance of a 2014 moratorium against moving Kenyan children away from the land of their birth. “Most of the applicants for sole custody and movement of children from the country are based on treatment of serious medical conditions but none of the allegations were supported by any medial reports,” says the report Progress on Implementation of the Moratorium on Inter-County and Resident Adoptions dated December 2017. ALSO READ: Woman sues hospital over pre-surgery hunger session The report also says applicants provided unreliable reports to support adoption. In one case, revealed an applicant who claimed to have known a child for 12 years yet the child was only aged 10. In another case, a father to a child is said to have died in 1995 yet the child was born in 2002. “This raises concern over accountability, dismal and casual approach to the children’s well-being, welfare, safety and security by duty managers,” says the report. In its report, the team calls for action against officials named in various court cases of the the intricate wave of child trafficking in the name of adoption of Kenyan children. According to the analysis of the 206 prospective adoption cases, Sweden had the highest number of prospective adoptive parents coming to Kenya. It was followed by the US, Germany and Italy. From 63 cases analysed from the courts, the committee found that 44 cases were filled in the high courts in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu after the moratorium of November 26, 2016. Of these, 20 children were placed for inter-country adoption after the moratorium, contrary to the Cabinet decision. “This means some children are declared free of adoption when they are not adoptable,” the report says. In all the 49 cases, the report says, there was no evidence of tracing done prior to declaring children free for adoption. The report questions the reason for offering all “available’ cases for adoption to other countries yet there were local parents willing to take up the children. The team found that some foreigners were offered more than one child within a span of two years, while the the list of Kenyans waiting to adopt children was as high as 440. The team attributed this to the fact the the foreigners paid more for adoption.

Read more at: https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2001284375/how-some-foreigners-sneak-out-children

Pain of mother put behind bars as infant given out for adoption By Sunday Standard Reporter | Published Sun, June 17th 2018 at 09:43, Updated June 17th 2018 at 10:06 GMT +3 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share on Facebook Share on Twitter [Photo: Courtesy] IN SUMMARY Woman put in remand for six months without child She was forcefully arrested and falsely accused of neglecting her child A seven-day-old baby was forcefully abducted from its mother and later placed for adoption in what experts have called a cruel contemplated and organised child theft. In the case that is one of the highlights of a report presented to President Uhuru Kenyatta, the mother was forcefully arrested and falsely accused of neglecting her child. The child was placed in a children’s home on grounds that he had been abandoned in Kibera on May 17, 2014 from where he was rescued by a Good Samaritan. ALSO READ: Unwanted babies can be given up for adoption At the home, the child was given a different name from his own. According to the report, the mother was then separately put in remand for six months without her child. “This was against the remand regulations for mothers with young children, who are never separated with their young ones,” the report says. The team termed the case an “abduction, kidnap, forceful and fraudulent”. “This mother was still having precious colostrum breast milk, probably still bleeding from child birth when her baby was forcefully taken away from her, causing serious health trauma to child and mother, which may take many years for her (mother) to heal,” says the report. During the period the mother was in remand, the child was labelled an abandoned child at the children’s home for six months. The experts said the six months were meant to provide the legal window for children to qualify for adoption. Police letter After the six months were over, police at Killimani Police Station wrote a letter indicating that efforts to trace the parents had proved fruitless and that no claims had been made to that date. “By the time the mother was released from remand, the child had already been branded as abandoned and declared free for adoption,” the report says. This happened despite the fact that the the home where the child was placed knew about the whereabouts of the mother, a matter that later ended in the courts. The experts’ investigation found that contrary to police reports, the baby was forcefully taken away from the mother. The mother was frog-matched to the chief’s camp and reported the alleged neglect of the baby who was only seven days old. It was from the chief’s camp that they were taken to the Kilimani Police Station for a night before the baby was forcefully taken away from the mother and into the home. The report says police letters on the case were all false, indicating that the whereabouts of the mother were unknown when, in fact, she was in their custody. “They (police) also stated that the child was abandoned while they forcefully abducted the child from the mother’s hands and handed over the child to the home,” said the report. ALSO READ: Adopted? Judge just gave hope Six months On further follow-up, the experts discovered that the mother was charged with child neglect, taken to court and thereafter taken to Langata Women’s Prison for six months. “The mother kept asking for the child but she was denied access and also the police declined to give her any information on the whereabouts of her baby,” the report says. The mother later followed up the adoption matter in court with a view to stopping it. The court ordered for DNA tests to establish maternity, which confirmed that indeed the child belonged to the mother in question. The ruling was yet to be made by the time the report was handed over to the authorities. In another case, a foreign citizen approached his embassy seeking to travel with a child outside the country during the period of the moratorium based on a custody order. The foreigner approached the Australian High Commission applying to be allowed to travel with the child. The investigators, however, found that the director of the orphanage, where the child was committed to for care and protection, chose to have the child under his personal custody without following the due process, only to come later and seek leave from the court for travel with the child outside of Kenya. The child was admitted to the orphanage on October 27, 2013 having allegedly been abandoned. But the experts established that the applicants had irregularly acquired a birth certificate and a passport for the child, giving the child their last name against the law. They concluded that the custody order was unprocedurally obtained and contrary to the law, which only allows change of name after the adoption order is given.

Read more at: https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2001284410/pain-of-mother-put-behind-bars-as-infant-given-out-for-adoption

Report lays bare how child theft syndicates thrive

Saturday Standard Reporter |

Published Sat, June 16th 2018

A four-year-old girl from Liberia, West Africa, holding a sign that reads "not for sale".

A government team has exposed new chilling details of a thriving child theft racket involving adoption societies, charities, state officers, police officers, lawyers and social workers, all eyeing vulnerable children. In a report handed to President Uhuru Kenyatta in December last year and accessed by the Saturday Standard Friday, child experts vouch for definite ban on inter-country adoption, citing numerous cases of abuse and theft of children.

Maneka Gandhi

Maneka Gandhi

To anyone who wondered why conviction rate in rape cases is so low, the answer lies in the statistic that just one in four of them is found guilty.

Union Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi’s revelation that no forensic analysis is conducted in 13,000 rape cases as premium forensic labs of the country lacked capacity is quite shocking.

To anyone who wondered why conviction rate in rape cases is so low, the answer lies in the statistic that just one in four of them is found guilty. We have found that the weakest part in conviction is forensic, the minister said. In a country where 106 rapes happen every day as per the National Crime Records Bureau’s 2016 report, it is disturbing to note that a premier forensic laboratory in Chandigarh handles just 160 cases a year.

At first sight, you may assume that the Santhawanam Charitable Trust in Kottayam is an orphanage or even a rehabilitation centre for women and children. Housing about 90 orphans, abused young mothers, and elderly abandoned women, what Santhawanam is, is a home for those who have nobody, asserts Annie Babu, its founder.

The 61-year-old opened her doors to orphaned children and distressed women in 2007 after an incident that changed both Annie and her husband’s life, forever.

Having always been drawn to social welfare and helping those who were downtrodden, Annie had spent her adulthood volunteering at Thanal, a charitable body for downtrodden and distraught women, which eventually led to her becoming the secretary of the organisation.

Children of Santhwanam. Source: Facebook.

At one point, the lack of space and inadequate funds to accommodate more people left Annie with no option other than to refuse shelter to many of them. Unfortunately, she later found out that two women had committed suicide, and the tragic incident was followed by the brutal murder of a woman by her alcoholic husband.

Representational image of a Muslim family | Wikimedia Commons

The AIMPLB is set to tell the Law Commission that adoption cannot be allowed due to fear of sexual relations between adopted child and mother.

New Delhi: Adoption is prohibited in Islam since there is a possibility of sexual relations between an adopted son and mother or an adopted son with a biological daughter, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) is set to tell the Law Commission.

In a meeting held between the Law Commission and the AIMPLB on 21 May — the first ever between the two — the commission had asked the AIMPLB to explain Islam’s position on a range of issues including adoption, inheritance, and child marriage, among others.

The meeting, which was held as a brainstorming exercise before the commission submits its final report on the uniform civil code to the Centre in a few months, was meant to make the commission understand the nature of certain personal laws in Islam.

Over 80 per cent of children adopted in the country in 2017-18 were below the age of two and there were not many kids of this age group legally free for adoption, according to official data.In 2017-18, 2,537 children below the age of two were adopted while the number above two years was just 597 children, the data given by the Central Adoption Resource Authority, the apex adoption body in the country, reflected.

In the age bracket of 2-4 years, 228 children were adopted; in the 4-6 years group, 143 children were adopted and above the age of 6 years, 226 children were adopted."More than 8,000 childcare institutions registered with CARA have primarily more than 90 per cent older children (above 5-6 years of age). And domestically there are very few couples who want to adopt older children," said CARA CEO Lt Col (retd) Deepak Kumar.

Kumar said that they then try to place older children in foster care."We know that we would not be able to place older children in adoption very easily and instead of letting them grow in a child care institution, it is better if they can be placed with some family in foster care. So basically foster care programme has been made to enable such older children to be placed in a family as they are as it is difficult to place them for adoption," Kumar told PTI.

But the foster care system in India has not been taken up in a manner as it should be as parents here too prefer younger children, he said.

"Many of them are treating foster care as a shortcut of adopting younger children where they keep a younger child with them over a period of time and then apply for adoption of the child," he said, noting that child care institutes need to be more careful in such cases.