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RUSSIAN SITUATION

UPDATED January 28, 2011

According to our sources, further talks on the Russo-American adoption agreement may not resume until the spring.

Until then, however, adoptions (agency and independent) are proceeding, but with some delays.

Adoptions HAVE NOT BEEN HALTED.

info@russianukrainianprivateadoptionproject.com

Countries: Russia

Persons: Ronald Federici

Abolish orphanages – NGO urges government

Abolish orphanages – NGO urges government

Last Updated: Friday, 28 January 2011, 17:33

Orphanaid Africa, a non-government organization (NGO) that sponsors families to care for orphans instead of taking them to orphanages, is calling on government to abolish orphanages in Ghana.

Awo Boatemaa Aboagye-Dankwa is the Head of Family Support Services at Orphanaid and she tells Asempa News orphanages are foreign to Ghanaian culture and even the West have abolished them because they have proven to be ineffective, so there is no reason for Ghana to keep orphanages.

This call comes in the wake of grave abuses and crimes against children in three orphanages in Ghana within the space of about a year.

Peace and Love Orphanage was rocked by child to child abuse due to adult negligence; massive and chilling child abuses by caregivers at Osu Children’s Home were caught on tape a few months back, and the latest is child trafficking at Hohoe Christian Orphanage.

Awo Aboagye-Dankwa said it is time Ghana looks for alternatives to orphanages because they are not helping.

“Besides the evidence of abuse and criminal activities in orphanages, they also detach children from society and make them lose their self confidence when they become adults,” she said.

She pointed out that research carried out by the Department of Social Welfare in 2009 indicated that up to 90 per cent of children in orphanage are not real orphans but rather children of poor parents who cannot afford to pay for the education of their ward.

Awo Aboagye-Dankwa said Orphanaid Africa has made proposals to government on alternative ways of providing orphans with proper and holistic care and upbringing in a way that will not detach them from their families and communities.

“Instead of orphanages, government can create foster homes, children residential homes, temporary placements and transit points for orphans to be restored to their extended families or to foster families like Orphanaid has been doing over the past three years,” she said.

Awo said so far Orphanaid had resettled 23 real orphans into their original communities and are working with a total of 48 families to provide support for more orphans all the way to the university level.

She said Orphanaid works with the families to provide a care plan for each child, adding “we provide all the funding for their education, health insurance and care, accommodation for parents and child and sometimes we pay families to care for the children.”

Asempa News also managed to reach Miss Comfort Obeng, a Coordinator at Orphanaid’s foster home and she said, unlike in orphanages, the families live with the children like their own and in separate apartments.

She therefore urged government to consider adopting the Orphanaid example on a large scale.

Story by: Samuel Nii Narku Dowuona/Asempa News/Ghana

Countries: Ghana

Hundreds of Spanish babies 'stolen from clinics and sold for adoption'

Hundreds of Spanish babies 'stolen from clinics and sold for adoption'
The families of 261 babies who disappeared in Spanish hospitals over five decades call for an investigation

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 January 2011 18.56 GMT

Hundreds of Spanish babies were stolen from their parents by a secret network of doctors and nurses and sold for adoption, according to a petition filed in Madrid.

The families of 261 babies who disappeared in Spanish hospitals over five decades called on the attorney general to open an investigation into the scandal, after presenting evidence from former employees at maternity clinics and parents who admitted illegally adopting babies.

What started as a system for taking children away from families deemed to be politically dangerous to the regime of General Francisco Franco became an illicit business that continued at least until the 1980s, a campaign group has claimed.

Doctors, nurses, nuns and priests are all suspected of lying to mothers who were told their children had died during, or straight after, birth. Journalists investigating a clinic in Madrid at the centre of the allegations found a baby's corpse in a fridge, leading to suggestions that bodies were kept to show parents to prove their own child had died. Campaigners believe thousands of cases of stolen babies will eventually come to light.

"The father of a friend of mine admitted to him that both he and I had been bought from a priest and a nun from Zaragoza after being born in the Miguel Servet hospital," said Antonio Barroso, who discovered four years ago that he was adopted. DNA tests have proved that the people who raised him were not his real parents.

"There are cases that are accompanied by proof in the form of DNA tests and others that are simply mothers who suspect that their babies were stolen," said lawyer Enrique Vila, who represents the National Association of Irregular Adoptions. "We think it was an organised mafia."

Inés Pérez, 89, has confirmed that a priest encouraged her to fake a pregnancy so she could be given a child due to be born at Madrid's San Ramón clinic in 1969. Her adopted daughter, also called Inés, was among those demanding an investigation.

In a separate case, workers from an undertaker's in Malaga said they sometimes buried empty children's coffins that arrived from a local clinic.

The street outside the attorney general's office was blocked by weeping people today hoping to discover what had become of their lost children.

Many said they had been told that apparently healthy babies had died within hours of birth. They had never seen the bodies and the hospitals had taken care of the burials.

Countries: Spain

EOCO probes sale of kids at orphanage

Source: citifmonline

EOCO probes sale of kids at orphanage

The Economic and Organised Crimes Office (EOCO) has begun investigations into allegations of child trafficking at the Hohoe Christian Orphanage.

The Deputy Executive Director of the EOCO in charge of Operations, Mr Charles Nii Adama Akrong, told the Daily Graphic that his office had reports that the Founder and Executive Director of the orphanage, Mr Nicholas Koku Azakpo, was allegedly engaged in the sale of the children at his orphanage to wealthy buyers in Europe and America.

He said suspected accomplices of Mr Azakpo at the Department of Social Welfare were also being investigated and confirmed that four investigators from the office had been to Hohoe to take statements from Mr Azakpo.

The office had also taken statements from Mr Issa Amegashitsi, the foster father of Delali Papa Amoaku, an eight-year-old boy who Mr Azakpo allegedly attempted to sell to an Italian for $7,000 last year and other persons who knew about the founder's activities, Mr Akrong said.

EOCO officials have also interviewed Mrs Helena Obeng-Asamoah, the Social Welfare Officer in charge of orphanages.

He said the investigations would later be extended to cover the activities of all orphanages and foster homes in the country because the sale of children in the country was believed to be widespread.

Mr Akrong said EOCO would not hesitate to recommend the closure of private orphanages in the country if investigations proved that proprietors had engaged in criminal activities such as the sale or trafficking of children.

Under the Economic and Organised Crime Act, 2010 (Act 804), EOCO is mandated to "investigate and, on the authority of the Attorney-General, prosecute serious offences that involve financial or economic loss to the republic or any state entity or institution in which the state has financial interest, money laundering, human trafficking, prohibited cyber activity, tax fraud and other serious offences".

It is also mandated to "recover the proceeds of crime; monitor the activities connected with the offences to detect correlative crimes; take reasonable measures necessary to prevent the commission of crimes specified and their correlative offences", among other things.

Last year, a tussle ensued between Mr Amegashitsi and Mr Azakpo over Delali when Mr Amegashitsi withdrew the boy from the orphanage, claiming he had heard that Mr Azakpo was about to offer the child for sale to an Italian.

That tussle resulted in Mr Amegashitsi being arrested and locked up by the police on two occasions on trumped-up charges of conspiracy to engage in child trafficking.

He was to be arraigned before an Accra circuit court on September 14, 2010 but minutes before he was scheduled to appear, the Attorney-General's Department, which had wind of it, stopped the trial.

On December 1, 2010, the A-G's Department also ordered that Delali, who had been taken away from Mr Amegashitsi by the police since July 26, 2010 and kept at the Osu Children's Home, should be handed over back to him.

And in August the same year, an American citizen, Mrs Jill Wiggins Smith, accused Mr Azakpo of demanding $7,000 from her to adopt Delali from his orphanage.

Mrs Smith had, earlier in 2008, adopted a two-year-old girl from the same orphanage, for which, she told the Daily Graphic, she had first paid $9,000 to an agency in the US called No Greater Gift.

However, No Greater Gift ceased to exist immediately after she had adopted the little girl.

Mrs Smith alleged that later when she arrived in Ghana to take the child away, Mr Azakpo extorted $2,000 and $300 from her on different occasions at his orphanage.

She said the move to adopt Delali stalled because of her refusal to pay the $7,000 demanded by Mr Azakpo.

When reached by the Daily Graphic for his comments, the founder denied the figures and said, "I just received $100 and another $200 and a few other hundreds later to process the papers".

He declined to answer further questions.

Organizations: No greater gift adoptions, inc.

Persons: Jill Wiggins Smith

Countries: Ghana, Italy

Bulgarian, Greek police break up baby trafficking ring

By staff writers From: NewsCore January 26, 2011 3:40AM

BULGARIAN and Greek police have arrested 14 people who allegedly trafficked newborn babies to Greece, Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said yesterday.

Five people were arrested in Bulgaria and nine others in Greece for allegedly organizing the illegal adoption of at least 14 Bulgarian babies, primarily of Roma origin, Tsvetanov said.

Countries: Greece, Bulgaria

Russian child rights ombudsman urges foreign adoption freeze

Society

Russian child rights ombudsman urges foreign adoption freeze

Topic: Talks on bilateral child adoption agreement

Russia's children's rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov

Countries: United States of America, Russia

MEPs demand easing of adoption restrictions

MEPs demand easing of adoption restrictions

Published Date: 26 January 2011
International adoptions should be encouraged in order to give a family life to children who are abandoned or at risk of becoming institutionalised in orphanages, the European Parliament said this week.
In a resolution agreed by a majority of MEPs in Strasbourg, members urged all EU institutions to play a more active role in facilitating inter-country adoptions and cutting red tape, while safeguarding children's rights.

The agreement stated that while adoption should preferably take place in a child's country of origin, an adoptive family should be found in another member state if this is not possible. MEPs also said placing a child in institutional care should be "the very last option" and only a temporary measure.

The debate focused on EU countries including Romania, Bulgaria and Italy where the problem of abandoned children has become increasingly serious in recent years.

Irish MEP Sean Kelly asked Romania specifically to lift its 2001 embargo on international adoptions, in a bid to prevent abandoned children from being exploited or trafficked for sex. He warned of "international racketeers" who pick up abandoned children and sell them on around the world into a life of slavery and "deplorable exploitation".

"We have an obligation to ensure that this does not happen to any child, which is why we need to open up the situation for good parents who want to adopt children, be they from Ireland, Romania or anywhere," said Mr Kelly.

Persons: Cecilia Wikstrom

Organizations: Lobby to Re-open Romanian Adoptions (2001- ), European Parliament, Coordinamento Nazionale “Amici dell’Adozione”, Amici dei Bambini

Countries: Ireland

ce smash illegal adoption ring

Police smash illegal adoption ring

Joint operation in Greece, Bulgaria leads to 12 arrests

Officers of the Greek and Bulgarian police forces have arrested 12 suspected members of a cross-border illegal adoption ring following parallel raids in the two countries, it emerged on Tuesday.

Of the suspects, seven were in arrested Greece and five in Bulgaria. Some are lawyers, doctors and notaries. Others are teenage women from Bulgaria’s Roma community who are believed to have given birth to 17 infants sold to childless couples for illegal adoption for between 20,000 and 25,000 euros, police said.

According to sources, the ring used as its base the central town of Lamia, where its suspected mastermind, a Bulgarian national, is believed to have been living for the past year and a half. Another key suspect is a female lawyer who practices in Athens but is of Bulgarian origin.

The investigation was launched four months ago under the aegis of Eurojust, the European Union agency dealing with judicial cooperation, after police determined that several young Bulgarian women had been visiting Greek hospitals to bear children before being immediately discharged.

Countries: Bulgaria, Greece

Romania and the International Adoptions Issue

Posted on 26 January 2011 by ?tefan D?r?bu?

For many years, international adoptions have been blocked by a moratorium in Romania. At that time (back in 2002) this was the only way to stop the trade with children which was booming in the country. It was the best kind of “business”: little investment, and a lot of income generated for international adoption agencies, which were eager to get as many children as possible abroad.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was ignored. Article 21 (b) recognises that “inter-country adoption may be considered as an alternative means of child’s care, if the child cannot be placed in a foster or an adoptive family or cannot in any suitable manner be cared for in the child’s country of origin”. In spite of this article, siblings were split, kids were taken abroad, without any preparation, without even meeting the adoptive parents. It was a time when adoption was done in the best interest of the adoptive parents, not in children’s best interest. There was hardly any post-adoption monitoring and supervision and not seldom did Romanian adopted kids get into institutions in the countries they were taken to, also because the written reports given by agencies to the adoptive parents were incorrect and misleading. Suddenly, once international adoptions were banned, the Romanian government was able to produce a viable law, which allowed the proper development of family-based, alternative services for children in state care. Mother and Baby Units were developed, the foster care system was created and ways were found to look after the kids in their own country of origin.

Now, the issue is back on the agenda again. However, many years have gone and we do need, I think, to re-visit the adoption legislation, with a view to bring some supplementary nuances, which would follow the lead of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is not as harsh as the Romanian adoption legislation is at present. For example, those kids who still wait to go abroad to adoptive families they met and want, should be allowed to take this step. Also, there are children with special needs who could benefit from a family abroad, as long as the adoption process and the preparation process are done in the best interest of the child as an imperative.

The only fear that still remains, is that the re-opening of international adoptions would lead to a new beginning for the adoption of children as trade. Because this is pure and harsh abuse upon children, under an umbrella of legality.

Organizations: Hope & Homes for Children

Persons: Stefan Darabus

Countries: Romania

Adopting a child-centred approach

Letters

Adopting a child-centred approach

RedditBuzz up

The Guardian, Wednesday 26 January 2011

Countries: United Kingdom

Persons: Martin Narey

Organizations: Coram