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Adoption agency funded despite Vietnam suspension

Adoption agency funded despite Vietnam suspension

CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor

Mon, Oct 10, 2011

THE HEALTH Service Executive paid more than €200,000 in 2010 to an adoption agency in Cork which deals with adoptions from Vietnam, despite the fact adoptions from that country were suspended in May 2009.

The money was paid through the HSE in Cork to the Cork-based Helping Hands adoption agency, set up in 2005 to assist couples adopting from Vietnam.

Authority to travel for talks on adoption agreements

The Irish Times - Monday, October 10, 2011

Authority to travel for talks on adoption agreements

CAROL COULTER

DELEGATIONS FROM the Adoption Authority of Ireland will travel to Mexico, the Philippines and the United States to discuss adoption agreements, the International Adoption Association was told at the weekend.

Geoffrey Shannon, chairman of the authority, told its annual conference it was in advanced discussions with a number of countries party to the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption after the incorporation of the convention into Irish law last year.

China's Missing Children

China's Missing Children

As many as 70,000 Chinese kids may get kidnapped each year. Parents, who often have nowhere to turn to for help, are taking matters into their own hands.

BY CHARLES CUSTER | OCTOBER 10, 2011

BEIJING—On April 10, 2010, the Liu family was living the Chinese dream. The couple had moved to the city, rented an apartment, and were blessed with two beautiful children. They weren't rich, but they were getting by. Like many Chinese people, they felt their lives were getting better.

The next morning, strange men came to their house, grabbed their son Liu Jingjun, dragged him into a white van, and drove off. Since then, the Lius have been looking for him. They haven't found him, but they have discovered that there are an awful lot of people just like themselves.

Since at least the 1980s, kidnapping and human trafficking have become a problem in China, and most often, the victims are children. Estimates vary on just how bad things have gotten. The Chinese government reports that fewer than 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, but the U.S. State Department says it's closer to 20,000. Some independent estimates put the number as high as 70,000 (compared with 100 to 200 children kidnapped per year in the United States, for example).

The vast majority of kidnapped children will never see their families again. In China, kids are abducted not for ransom but for sale. Often, they come from poor and rural families -- the families least likely to be capable of tracking their kids down or fighting back. Some children are then sold to new "adoptive" families looking for children. Others are sold into slave labor, prostitution, or a life on the streets. In some cases, healthy children are brutally crippled by handlers on the theory that a child with broken legs or horrific boils looks sadder and can earn more money begging on the street.

Some children are even sold into adoption overseas. Chinese adoption agencies seeking the substantial donations foreign parents make when they adopt -- in some cases, as much as $5,000 -- have been known to purchase children from human traffickers, though these cases appear to be relatively rare.

Most instances of kidnapping are perpetrated by gangs that are large, national, and highly organized. Based on cases solved by Chinese police, it's not uncommon for some kidnapping rings to have dozens or even hundreds of members, and to be responsible for the kidnappings of hundreds of children.

The estimates vary so widely because official numbers are hard to come by and harder to trust. Pi Yijun, a professor at the Institute for Criminal Justice and an expert on crimes involving children, says, "Data about the dark side of society is extremely difficult to obtain, and even when it is made public, the Public Security Bureau [i.e., the police] only reports based on the number of cases they've uncovered." That means that China's official statistics on kidnapping are based only on cases that are proved to be crimes. Because most parents have no proof that their child was kidnapped (rather than running away on his or her own), many cases are filed as missing-person reports and thus go uncounted in official statistics.

On the morning of April 11, 2010, Mrs. Liu was in the apartment, but she and her husband's son -- just 2 at the time -- had wandered out the door and was playing with some other kids from the neighborhood. When she looked out the door and saw he was missing, she called her husband, and when the two of them still couldn't find the boy, they called the cops.

The police came. "They said nothing," said Mr. Liu. "They said, 'It's not urgent; just relax. Maybe he ran away by himself or he's at a neighbor's house. Just look around yourselves.'"

Other parents of kidnapped children say this is common; unless there's concrete, immediate proof of a kidnapping, police won't even accept a missing-person report until the subject has been missing for at least 24 hours.

Mrs. Zhu, the mother of kidnapped 12-year-old Lei Xiaoxia, who went missing on May 24 in Shanxi province, reported her daughter's case to anyone who would listen -- three different police authorities, her daughter's school, and even their city's education bureau -- but always got the same answer. "They said, 'All we can do is investigate for you; there's nothing we can really do [otherwise]."

These investigations leave much to be desired. Mrs. Zhu told me, "After we reported [the disappearance], they went out and patrolled for a bit, but after that we never saw them looking again." They also never went to the train station or the bus station to check the surveillance tapes, she said. Later, a reporter discovered that Zhu's daughter had been seen at school that day, but the police had also forgotten to check the school's security tapes, which had since been automatically deleted by the surveillance system. Lei Xiaoxia is still missing.

Even when police do investigate seriously, happy endings are rare. Trafficking gangs are highly organized. Children are moved over great distances and shuffled between handlers after they're kidnapped to ensure they are impossible to trace.

Li Yong, an adult who was kidnapped around 1988 and sold to another family when he was about 5 (he's not sure of his real age or birthday), remembers he was moved around quite a bit. "After I was kidnapped, I was taken into cars, a long-distance bus, and a train," he says. Years after his kidnapping, police finally tracked down one man involved with Li's kidnapping, but the trail ended there. The seller, the kidnapper, and the handlers who watched Li during various stages of his journey have yet to be found.

Investigating kidnapping cases effectively requires sustained effort, ongoing cooperation between numerous local precincts, and high-tech methods of tracking and identifying both kidnappers and children. When a particular gang gets onto the police's radar, higher authorities may help organize this sort of sustained effort, and when caught, human traffickers face stiff sentences and even the death penalty. But many kidnapping cases never make it past the local precinct, where they're filed as missing-person cases and, generally, forgotten.

Some parents accept their fates and wait quietly for a phone call from the police that will probably never come. But more and more parents are taking to the Internet and to the streets to search for their children.

"We look every day," Mr. Liu, a contract laborer, said. "Before my son was taken, I didn't know how to use the Internet, but now I go to an Internet cafe every day. I can't afford my own computer, so I go there to look for my son, making posts about him and searching through the Net."

An entire ecosystem of Internet services has sprung up for Chinese parents like Liu. Sites like "Baby Come Home" collect information, photos, and other data from tens of thousands of parents and help them publicize it all. They also collect photos and reports of street children for parents of kidnapped kids to browse, looking for their children.

Many parents also take to the street. Mr. Liu connected online with other parents of kidnapped children in his area, and now they organize events together. One of the parents, whose son was also kidnapped, has decorated his truck with photos of his son and dozens of other missing children. The parents pick a busy street corner, park the truck there, surround it with large posters about their children, and hand out fliers and cards to passers-by.

When he can, Liu brings his young daughter along to these events, where she helps her parents pass out flyers. She's too young to understand what happened to her little brother, but she hasn't forgotten him. She dreams about him, her father says. "When we hear her talk about him, it's devastating."

Some have placed the blame for China's child-trafficking problem squarely at the feet of the one-child policy, but that's an oversimplification according to Pi Yijun, of the Institute for Criminal Justice. Part of the problem is that compared with other things one might steal, such as cars or computers, children are easy to get ahold of and difficult to track, he says. "Additionally, if [the kidnapper] has got a buyer already, they can reap the rewards quickly, and I think that's an important reason" that kidnapping is so common in China.

Of course, without buyers there would be no sellers, and there are still buyers aplenty in China. True, the one-child policy has made children scarcer, but because families with more than one child -- regardless of whether the children are adopted or birthed -- must pay fines, there's no real reason for healthy parents to choose to purchase a kidnapped child rather than just having another one of their own. Often, the buyers of kidnapped kids are married couples who can't conceive or who have given birth to only daughters and want to be sure their next child is a son. Some families also buy older girls as brides for their sons if the son can't attract a wife through traditional means (often because of some mental or physical disability).

China's culture of silence also plays a role. "My son will never know he was kidnapped and purchased," Mr. Liu says. "In our hometown, when people buy wives, no one says anything. No one talks. Our child was too young to understand what happened to him; when he grows up he won't understand that it's all fake."

This is not an uncommon phenomenon. After Li Yong was kidnapped and sold to his new family in Jiangsu, he walked around telling neighbors his original name and asking to go home, speaking in a dialect foreign to that province. But no one reported anything to the authorities until more than a decade later, and by then, it was way too late. Many Chinese believe that getting involved in someone else's business is asking for trouble, and in some rural areas where education levels remain low, purchasing children is still considered an acceptable alternative for couples who are infertile or too old to conceive safely.

For his part, Mr. Liu doesn't blame the men who kidnapped his son. "We parents, the parents of lost children, hate these people, and society hates them too, but sometimes you can't blame human traffickers. Sometimes you have to blame our society. What I mean is, [in China] we still don't have a strong rule of law. If it were stronger, could this kind of thing happen?"

Mr. Liu and his wife are still searching for their son. Mrs. Zhu and her husband are still searching for their daughter. They work when they need to, but their lives are on hold until they get some news, just like the tens of thousands of other parents nationwide who are searching. "It's like we're living with dead hearts," Mrs. Zhu told me between sobs. "If we can't find our child, life is meaningless."

Court orders El Salvador to investigate children's disappearances

Court orders El Salvador to investigate children's disappearances

 
REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- Human rights advocates are hailing an international court decision ordering the government of El Salvador to fully investigate the cases of hundreds of children who disappeared during the nation’s civil war three decades ago.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in San Jose, Costa Rica, found rights violations in the cases of six youngsters who vanished after being taken away by soldiers in 1981 and 1982.

One of the six children, Gregoria Contreras, 4 years old when she disappeared, was reunited with her family many years later after being tracked down by a Salvadoran group, the Assn. for the Search for Missing Children, also known as Pro-Busqueda. The group’s enduring search for children who went missing during the conflict was chronicled earlier this year by The Times here.

In its ruling, issued to the parties late last week, the court found what it called a “systematic pattern of forced disappearances of children” by army personnel battling leftist rebels. Many of the children, seized during raids, were placed into the lucrative international adoption market and raised abroad. Since 1994, Pro Busqueda has received reports of more than 800 children who vanished during the war. The group has located nearly half of them.

“The court recognizes the truth that was for years denied to relatives of the hundreds of [missing] children,” Pro-Busqueda’s director, Ester Alvarenga, said in a statement.

Salvadoran military authorities impeded investigations into the cases for many years. The leftist government of President Mauricio Funes, elected in 2009, has promised to investigate cases, but rights advocates say it has done little because of a lack of funds. Moreover, they say, few cases are likely to be solved unless the military is ordered to open files from the wartime period.

“One of the main difficulties in determining what happened to the disappeared children is obstruction by military forces when authorities charged with the investigation try to get information,” said Gisela De Leon, a lawyer for the Center for Justice and International Law who argued the case on behalf of the children. “The state will have to adopt measures to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

The case before the inter-American tribunal involved three sets of children who disappeared separately during the early 1980s.

Missing toddler found

Missing toddler found

 

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Johannesburg - A toddler who was allegedly sold to a child trafficking syndicate was found on Friday afternoon at a house in Kraaifontein in Cape Town, police said.

The 1-year-old boy, Ovayo Maxetuka from Khayelitsha, was found after police received an anonymous phone call on his whereabouts, said Warrant Officer November Filander.

The boy was in the care of the alleged trafficker's neighbour, said Filander.

"The 41-year-old woman later handed herself over to police at the Kraaifontein police station," he said.

"She will appear in the Khayelitsha Magistrate's Court on Monday, on charges of child trafficking."

Ovayo was last seen on Tuesday. The child's 18-year-old mother discovered he was missing when she returned home from visiting family in Philippi.

She received information that her child had been sold by her mother and a neighbour to a woman believed to be involved in child trafficking.

The 36-year-old grandmother and 43-year-old neighbour were arrested and appeared in the Khayelitsha Magistrate's Court on Friday, where their case was postponed.

They will remain in police custody until October 14.

UN bashes Swedish children's rights

UN bashes Swedish children's rights

Published: 8 Oct 11 11:11 CET | Double click on a word to get a translation
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/36622/20111008/

For the fifth time, Sweden has been criticised by the UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child for not having introduced their children's rights convention as Swedish law.

Sweden signed the convention in 1990, and an added protocol on child trafficking in 2006.

For the first time, the UN committee in Geneva has now investigated how well the Swedish government has followed the protocol on protecting children against trafficking, prostitution and child pornography.

The government was criticised on more points than Christina Heilborn, children's rights lawyer at Unicef's Swedish division, was expecting, including criticism on how refugee and asylum-seeking children are treated in Sweden.

"The committee feel these groups aren't protected sufficiently here," said Heilborn to news agency TT.

The committee has investigated Sweden and the children's rights convention on four previous occasions.

"A general criticism, which has been voiced several times before, is about making the convention Swedish law. This is a recurring criticism against Sweden, and the government has chosen to completely ignore it."

A country such as Sweden is expected to take a convention about children's human rights very seriously, stated the committee earlier this week.

The government, represented in Geneva by department officials, stated that Swedish laws generally provide children with better protection than the convention does.

When asked by TT how the convention would improve upon Swedish law, Christina Heilborn responded:

"One major difference would be a clear protection against discrimination, that all children in Sweden would have the same rights by law, whether they lack documents, are in hiding, asylum-seekers or Swedish citizens. Today children are divided into groups which have different rights. This is something which is not allowed according to the children's rights convention."

The UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child also wants Sweden to introduce a harsher definition of what constitutes child pornography.

Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents

Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents

BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

Joao Pina for The New York Times

Victoria Montenegro was abducted as a newborn by a military colonel. She testified last spring in the trial over baby thefts.

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The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who lost children during Argentina's military dictatorship, protesting in Buenos Aires in 1977.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the military duringArgentina’s dictatorship, stands accused of leading the effort to take babies from mothers in clandestine detention centers and give them to military or security officials, or even to third parties, on the condition that the new parents hide the true identities. Mr. Videla is one of 11 officials on trial for 35 acts of illegal appropriation of minors.

The trial is also revealing the complicity of civilians, including judges and officials of the Roman Catholic Church.

The abduction of an estimated 500 babies was one of the most traumatic chapters of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The frantic effort by mothers and grandmothers to locate their missing children has never let up. It was the one issue that civilian presidents elected after 1983 did not excuse the military for, even as amnesty was granted for other “dirty war” crimes.

“Even the many Argentines who considered the amnesty a necessary evil were unwilling to forgive the military for this,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director forHuman Rights Watch.

In Latin America, the baby thefts were largely unique to Argentina’s dictatorship, Mr. Vivanco said. There was no such effort in neighboring Chile’s 17-year dictatorship.

One notable difference was the role of the Catholic Church. In Argentina the church largely supported the military government, while in Chile it confronted the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and sought to expose its human rights crimes, Mr. Vivanco said.

Priests and bishops in Argentina justified their support of the government on national security concerns, and defended the taking of children as a way to ensure they were not “contaminated” by leftist enemies of the military, said Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights advocate who has investigated dozens of disappearances and testified at the trial last month.

Ms. Montenegro contended: “They thought they were doing something Christian to baptize us and give us the chance to be better people than our parents. They thought and felt they were saving our lives.”

Church officials in Argentina and at the Vatican declined to answer questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the covert adoptions.

For many years, the search for the missing children was largely futile. But that has changed in the past decade thanks to more government support, advanced forensic technology and a growing genetic data bank from years of testing. The latest adoptee to recover her real identity, Laura Reinhold Siver, brought the total number of recoveries to 105 in August.

Still, the process of accepting the truth can be long and tortuous. For years, Ms. Montenegro rejected efforts by officials and advocates to discover her true identity. From a young age, she received a “strong ideological education” from Colonel Tetzlaff, an army officer at a secret detention center.

If she picked up a flier from leftists on the street, “he would sit me down for hours to tell me what the subversives had done to Argentina,” she said.

He took her along to a detention center where he spent hours discussing military operations with his fellow officers, “how they had killed people, tortured them,” she said.

“I grew up thinking that in Argentina there had been a war, and that our soldiers had gone to war to guarantee the democracy,” she said. “And that there were no disappeared people, that it was all a lie.”

She said he did not allow her to see movies about the “dirty war,” including “The Official Story,” the 1985 film about an upper-middle-class couple raising a girl taken from a family that was disappeared.

In 1992, when she was 15, Colonel Tetzlaff was detained briefly on suspicion of baby stealing. Five years later, a court informed Ms. Montenegro that she was not the biological child of Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife, she said.

“I was still convinced it was all a lie,” she said.

By 2000, Ms. Montenegro still believed her mission was to keep Colonel Tetzlaff out of prison. But she relented and gave a DNA sample. A judge then delivered jarring news: the test confirmed that she was the biological child of Hilda and Roque Montenegro, who had been active in the resistance. She learned that she and the Montenegros had been kidnapped when she was 13 days old.

At a restaurant over dinner, Colonel Tetzlaff confessed to Ms. Montenegro and her husband: He had headed the operation in which the Montenegros were tortured and killed, and had taken her in May 1976, when she was 4 months old.

“I can’t bear to say any more,” she said, choking up at the memory of the dinner.

A court convicted Colonel Tetzlaff in 2001 of illegally appropriating Ms. Montenegro. He went to prison, and Ms. Montenegro, still believing his actions during the dictatorship had been justified, visited him weekly until his death in 2003.

Slowly, she got to know her biological parents’ family.

“This was a process; it wasn’t one moment or one day when you erase everything and begin again,” she said. “You are not a machine that can be reset and restarted.”

It fell to her to tell her three sons that Colonel Tetzlaff was not the man they thought he was.

“He told them that their grandfather was a brave soldier, and I had to tell them that their grandfather was a murderer,” she said.

When she testified at the trial, she used her original name, Victoria, for the first time. “It was very liberating,” she said.

She says she still does not hate the Tetzlaffs. But “the heart doesn’t kidnap you, it doesn’t hide you, it doesn’t hurt you, it doesn’t lie to you all of your life,” she said. “Love is something else.”

Charles Newbery contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 8, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that "The Official Story" was a film about a boy who was taken from his family. The movie was about a girl.

 

IAC 193 Results

Friday, October 7, 2011



IAC 193 Results



The following referrals were issued in IAC Session 193 which was held on 09/09/11:


1) Greek dossier from March 2006 referred a female child aged 2 years and 5 months

2) Italian dossier from August 2009 referred a waiting child (#1581) with a profile on the MOJ site

3) Italian dossier from September 2009 referred a female child aged 7 years and 6 months

4) U.S. dossier from March 2010 referred a male child aged 2 years 7 months with
data onfamily history and with peculiarities in the health status

5) Italian dossier from November 2010 referred a waiting child (#1519) with a profile on the MOJ site

6) Italian dossier from January 2011 referred awaiting child (#1579) with a profile on the MOJ site

7) U.S. dossier from March 2011 referred a waiting child (#1431) with a profile on the MOJ site

8) U.S. dossier from August 2011 referred waiting children (#900 & #902) with profiles on the MOJ site

9) Italian dossier from August 2011 referred a waiting child (#1498) with a profile on the MOJ site

10) U.S. dossier from September 2011 referred waiting children (#28 & #14) with profiles on the MOJ site

11) Canadian dossier from September 2011 referred a waiting child (#1188) with a profile on the MOJ site

12) U.S. dossier from September 2011 referred a waiting child (#1478) with a profile on the MOJ site



Posted by Viviane at 4:08 AM

Letter from US Embassy re Zone info for health care worker, relinquishment concerns_Addis Ababa_10-5-11.pdf

Letter from US Embassy re Zone info for health care worker, relinquishment concerns_Addis Ababa_10-5-11.pdf