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Anatomy of an Adoption Crisis | Foreign Policy

Anatomy of an Adoption Crisis

An exclusive investigation uncovers how State Department officials uncovered systemic corruption in the Vietnamese adoption system -- and how they struggled to do something about it.

BY E.J. GRAFF | SEPTEMBER 12, 2010

 

It seemed like a nightmare right out of Kafka. In late 2007 and early 2008, Americans with their adopted babies in arms, or pictures of babies to come, were being stonewalled by faceless U.S. bureaucrats. The U.S. government refused to issue visas that would allow those babies to come home from Vietnam -- and wouldn't explain why.

My visit to Romania - Blog prettygaywritings

My Visit to Romania

I visited Tirgu Mures, Romania, in November 2006 with one of our local judges, a court psychologist, and a youth services provider on sort of a "legal missionary" trip to talk to local Romanian government officials about our foster care and adoption procedures in Florida. We spent a week in a whirlwind of meetings with their judges, child protection workers, local bar associations, and law school students. We were hosted by an organization called Livada, which means "orchard" in Romanian, which was founded by an American minister who was concerned about the number of orphans in Romanian (mostly Gypsy, or Roma, children) and the horrific state run orphanages. Below is a story about my trip.

I don’t know what to expect as we enter the state run orphanage in Ludus (pronounced “Loo-doosh”), Romania on a chilly November morning. Our American host, Bruce Thomas, explains that we have to leave our cameras in the car, including any cell phones that have picture-taking capabilities. These are the rules – no cameras, and no reporters, in the state run facilities. This gives us a clue as to what we are to find.

Ludus is one of a smattering of remaining large institutions for orphaned children in Romania. It houses about 130 children, ages 6-21. There aren’t adequate words to describe the bleak and hopeless feel of the place. The outside of the building is the poster child for a communist-era government building. It is a drab, concrete block monolith with metal grates on the bottom floor windows that screams “institution.” The interior of the building shares the same stark, cold, style. It brings to mind what an old insane asylum must have looked like in the 1940s in our country.

Our first stop is a “play room” used by the disabled children at the orphanage. There is apparently no such thing as mainstreaming in Romania, so the children, most of whom appear to be autistic, are kept in a bare room all day, supervised by what appears to me to be a teacher in a catatonic state. When the door opens, the children rush out at us, screaming and jumping and spilling some sort of liquid out of a plastic container. We hope it is only water. One child goes immediately for my wrist to determine whether I am wearing a watch, and upon discovering it, promptly tries to bite it off. I say, “Nu, nu!” (“No” in Romania) but the “teacher” just sits there placidly. This, and other similar antics, goes on the entire time we are in the room. All of the children have shaved or closely cropped hair, making it difficult to distinguish gender. Most, despite being 8 years and older, wear diapers.

Suspension - pipeline

September 3, 2010


Effective August 31, 2010, the Rwandan Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion (MIGEPROF) temporarily suspended all new applications for intercountry adoptions to prepare for accession to the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Inter-Country Adoption (the Convention). U.S. Embassy Kigali officials met with Rwandan adoption officials on September 1, 2010 to clarify which cases would be included in pipeline processing.  The Government of Rwanda has stated that it will not accept dossiers for new adoption cases until Rwanda accedes to the Convention.  Dossiers received by the MIGEPROF or Rwandan embassies prior to August 31, 2010 will continue to be processed by Rwandan authorities.  Implementing the Convention can be a lengthy process and may take a year or more.  

Questions concerning adoptions in Rwanda may be sent to either AskCI@state.gov or consularkigali@state.gov.  Please check www.adoption.state.gov for updates as they become available.

Youth cheats lover, gives son for adoption in Bangalore

Youth cheats lover, gives son for adoption in Bangalore

Published: Friday, Sep 10, 2010, 9:46 IST
By Rakshita Adyanthaya | Place: Bangalore | Agency: DNA

A BBM student has accused her lover of making her pregnant and later selling off their newborn baby boy, through illegal adoption.

However, investigating officers said the child was legally given for adoption with her consent. She had registered the case only because the youth refused to marry her, they added.

The complainant, Twinkle Sen, 22, had come to Bangalore to pursue her BBM degree and was staying as a paying guest. She alleged that an unknown person used to call her regularly and expressed his wish to become friends with her. As she refused to answer his calls, he allegedly came to her PG to meet her.

“He introduced himself as Rajiv Mohato and claimed that he knew everything about me. I accepted his friendship after I felt that he was a well-mannered person,” Twinkle said.

The friendship blossomed into love and after seven months on March 5, 2008, Rajiv took her to a temple in Sanjay Nagar. He applied sindoor on her forehead and told her that they both were married, Twinkle claimed.

“We started staying together in his house like a married couple. His parents were also aware of our relationship,” she said.

Meanwhile, Twinkle became pregnant and desired to have a formal wedding. But, they took her to a nursing home in
Koramangala, and tried to abort the child, which didn’t materialise.

“After the birth of my child in July 2009, they took my signatures on some papers and gave away my baby for adoption. I haven’t even seen my child,” Twinkle alleged.




Kari Haege of Hastings assists residents of Liberia

Kari Haege of Hastings assists residents of Liberia

When Kari Haege of Hastings went to Liberia in April as part of the adoption process for two children, she did not expect to be impacted as much as she was. The trip has changed her life.

By: Jane Lightbourn, The Hastings Star-Gazette

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Adoption Suspension Leaves Children in Limbo

NEPAL
Adoption Suspension Leaves Children in Limbo
By Bhuwan Sharma

KATHMANDU, Sep 10, 2010 (IPS) - A big question marks looms over the future of many Nepali children in various child homes in the country in the wake of the suspension by 11 countries of their child adoption programmes for this Himalayan nation.

"Children will now have to remain in grim orphanages or may risk a worse fate by staying with families that don’t want them," says Philip Holmes, the adoptive father of two Nepali children and country director of Esther Benjamins Trust-Nepal, a U.K.-registered charity engaged in childcare and child protection and fighting child trafficking in Nepal. 

Some 400 Nepali children are adopted by foster parents each year from 44 institutional homes accredited by the country’s Ministry for Women, Children and Social Welfare. There is no data available on the number of Nepali children given up for adoption yearly. 

Besides orphans, Nepali law permits inter-country adoption for voluntarily committed children, who have been surrendered to a child welfare home, orphanage or Bal Mandir, a national children’s organisation, by either their guardians or parents. 

Problems ranging from fake documents, lack of transparency in handling funds and corruption in the adoption process, which have been reported over the years, have led to the latest round of adoption suspensions. 

Following similar allegations by recipient countries, the Nepali government suspended inter-country adoptions in May 2007, before lifting the self- imposed ban in January 2009. Intra-country adoptions were allowed to continue although local response to calls for adoption had always been very poor. 

Even after the 2007 suspension and its eventual lifting, adoption problems continued to plague the tiny kingdom in the eastern Himalayas. In February, The Hague Conference on Private International Law, an inter-governmental organisation, released a report roundly criticising Nepal’s adoption system, citing gross irregularities. 

In 2008, Nepal came up with the "Terms and Conditions and Process for Granting Approval for Adoption of Nepali Child by an Alien." These, however, were "not adequate as a legal framework to conduct inter-country adoptions," said the Hague Report. It added that Nepal’s refurbished laws still "fall short of Hague Convention standards." 

The report recommended "better regulations of children’s homes" and elimination of "financial gain from inter-country adoption." 

On Aug. 6, the U.S. government slapped a ban on inter-country adoptions from Nepal, citing the need "to protect the rights and interests of certain Nepali children and their families, and of U.S. prospective adoptive parents." Ten other countries – Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and Britain – had previously taken similar actions following the release of The Hague report. 

"A few bad apples are besmirching the image of the entire sector," says Sher Jung Karki, undersecretary of the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare. 

"There are mainly two problems plaguing the sector: The documentation process is shoddy, which weakens the cases even of children who genuinely qualify for adoption," says Upendra Keshari Neupane, a member of the government’s Investigation, Recommendation and Monitoring Committee on inter-country adoption. 

"The second is the practise by some child centres of resorting to fake documents in order to put up even unqualified children for adoption," Neupane adds. Data reveals that foster parents prefer to adopt children who are younger than three years. 

"The primary problem is with the huge amount of money involved," says Holmes. "When one has to pay 8,000 U.S. dollars to adopt a Nepali child, of which 5,000 dollars goes to the child care centre, there are bound to be irregularities. In Nepal, 5,000 dollars is quite a big amount." 

"The adoption fee has to be brought down to curb irregularities," Holmes says, adding, "a blanket suspension is not the answer to the problem." 

But Karki points out that Nepal’s adoption fee is quite low compared to many other countries. Institutional homes, he says, need money to take care of many other children who remain in their care. 

Holmes believes the Nepali government should be given the benefit of the doubt, noting that there has been some progress since authorities reopened the sector in 2009. 

"When I adopted my first child in 2006, I was liaising directly with the child care centre, which is wrong," Holmes says. "But I got my second child in 2009 through the central allocation system. I filed an application in May and until September, when we finally brought him home, we were not allowed to meet him." 

According to Article 29 of the 1993 Hague Inter-country Adoption Convention, which Nepal signed in April 2009 but has yet to ratify, direct contact between the prospective adoptive parents and the biological parents or guardians is not permitted before verification of the suitability of the child and the prospective adoptive parents. 

Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare spokesperson Ram Prasad Bhattarai says, "more needs to be done but things are changing." 

Karki echoes Bhattarai’s observation. "Things are moving forward," says Karki. "We are working to nip the problem in the bud by developing a system whereby a child can be taken in by the institutional homes only after doing a thorough check of his or her background." 

"We are also trying to lay down stringent punishment for those trying to turn the industry into a money-making business," Karki adds. "Right now, we can do nothing other than delisting the centre from our list of centres accredited by the ministry for inter-country adoption." 

Neupane believes widespread poverty is also fuelling the irregularities. Poor parents have been found colluding with institutional homes to make it appear their children are orphans, he says. 

"Sometimes they do it in the hope that their child will have a better future while at other times, acute poverty forces them to do this for some money," Neupane says.
 
 

Boy caught up in clash of cultures over adoption

Boy caught up in clash of cultures over adoption

By MICHAEL FIELD - Stuff

Last updated 05:00 10/09/2010

Iqbal Sharif

IQBAL SHARIF: Wants the Pakistan-born child to live in New Zealand.

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An Auckland judge will decide the fate of a 16-month-old boy in a clash of cultures over international adoption.

Mohammad Huzaifa was born in Karachi in May last year. Two days later his birth parents gave him to their close friends, Pakistan-born New Zealand citizens Iqbal Sharif and Sara Sami, under an arrangement made before the birth.

The Pakistan Family Court has issued a Certificate of Guardianship, formally recognising the donation. But Immigration New Zealand will not give the child a visa.

Pakistan is governed by Islamic Sharia law, which does not recognise the concept of legal adoption – Mohammad has kept his birth father's name despite being given to the New Zealand couple.

The case's outcome hangs on a couple of words – guardianship versus adoption – and highlights the contrast between the laws of Islamic and secular states.

If the boy's adoptive parents are successful, it will be the first adoption between Pakistan and New Zealand.

Justice Christopher Allan heard the case in the High Court at Auckland yesterday and will give his judgment later.

Mr Sharif, through lawyer Evgeny Orlov, claims his Bill of Rights Act rights have been breached and asked Justice Allan for a declaration against the attorney-general.

In his affidavit, Mr Sharif said he and his wife had been married since 1994. Since then she had suffered several miscarriages and failed IVF treatment.

As their hopes of a child faded, a close friend promised them a child. Two days after he was born, the child was given to the couple and Mrs Sami has since been in Karachi with him, unable to come home. "Our family has been separated since this time and this has caused us an enormous amount of stress."

Mr Orlov told the court that the couple had wanted to "adopt a child from their own Muslim culture so they could bring up the child with its own belief systems and cultural values".

The couple's friends had "performed an act of great grace with considerable beneficial religious significance for them in giving up their child as a gift to their childless friends".

Both sides in the court accept the guardianship was honest and open, did not involve child trafficking, and did not come under the Hague Convention. "The real issue is over a word, and the word is adoption," Mr Orlov said.

Immigration NZ had failed to consider the rights and best interests of the child. New Zealand had "a case of tunnel vision" by not recognising Sharia law's view of a child's identity and guardianship, Mr Orlov said.

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If Justice Allan rules that Sharia law on guardianship equates with New Zealand law on adoption, Immigration NZ will need to reconsider its refusal to grant a visa.

A Social Development Ministry spokesman said New Zealand did not have an adoption programme with Pakistan and, "as far as we know, Pakistan does not have adoption legislation".

An overseas guardianship order was not enough to allow Internal Affairs to grant a child New Zealand citizenship.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4114463/Boy-caught-up-in-clash-of-cultures-over-adoption

By MICHAEL FIELD - Stuff

Last updated 05:00 10/09/2010

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Minister requests investigation into foreign adoption case

Minister requests investigation into foreign adoption case

Family and Population Minister Moushira Khattab has submitted a formal request to the attorney-general for investigations into a case in Qalyubiya in which parents are alleged to have put their children up for adoption by Egyptian expatriates living in Europe.
“Such practices violate human and child rights and represent a form of child trafficking,” Khattab said, adding that the law granted the state the authority to bring the parents in question to trial.
Al-Masry Al-Youm has obtained documents proving the existence of "agents" tasked with mediating adoption deals between Egyptian families and expatriate Egyptians in European countries, particularly Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden.
More than 25 documents reveal that adopted children--all under the age of 15--come mostly from the villages of Aghour al-Soghra and Aghour al-Kobra in the Qalyubiya Governorate, located some 30 km north of Cairo.
According to a judicial source speaking on condition of anonymity, more than 500 children this year alone have been sent to Europe for this reason--without any social or legal repercussions--even though the practice is in complete violation of both Egyptian and Islamic law.
It is notable that, in compliance with Islamic Sharia, Egypt's Child Law explicitly prohibits adoption.
Egyptian laws against human trafficking consider guilty anyone involved in the practice, whether by selling, offering to sell, purchasing, transporting or delivering children--either domestically or across national borders--through the use of force, threat, fraud, deception or abduction.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.

Preet Mandir: Bombay HC allows adoption of 17 children

Preet Mandir: Bombay HC allows adoption of 17 children

Express News Service Tags : court, temple, preet mandir Posted: Fri Sep 10 2010, 06:14 hrs Pune:  

 

 

The Bombay High Court recently allowed Preet Mandir to continue the adoption process of 17 children that had begun before the adoption home’s licences were revoked. “All these 17 cases are of foreign adoption and Central Adoption Resources Agency (CARA) has undertaken to give a no-objection certificate in these 17 inter-country adoptions,” said advocate Ajit Kulkarni, who represented Preet Mandir in the Bombay High Court.

 

 

The two-member bench of Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justice R P Sondur-Baldota on Wednesday set aside the cancellation of adoption license of Preet Mandir stating it is against natural justice, but said the licences remain to be suspended till the the case continues in the court. Though the move has come as a major relief for the 17 adoptions, the court is yet to decide on whether the remaining children in Preet Mandir can be transferred to another adoption house. The matter is expected to be heard on September 16.

Adoption Suspension Leaves Children in Limbo

Adoption Suspension Leaves Children in Limbo By Bhuwan Sharma KATHMANDU, Sep 10, 2010 (IPS) - A big question marks looms over the future of many Nepali children in various child homes in the country in the wake of the suspension by 11 countries of their child adoption programmes for this Himalayan nation. "Children will now have to remain in grim orphanages or may risk a worse fate by staying with families that don’t want them," says Philip Holmes, the adoptive father of two Nepali children and country director of Esther Benjamins Trust-Nepal, a U.K.-registered charity engaged in childcare and child protection and fighting child trafficking in Nepal. Some 400 Nepali children are adopted by foster parents each year from 44 institutional homes accredited by the country’s Ministry for Women, Children and Social Welfare. There is no data available on the number of Nepali children given up for adoption yearly. Besides orphans, Nepali law permits inter-country adoption for voluntarily committed children, who have been surrendered to a child welfare home, orphanage or Bal Mandir, a national children’s organisation, by either their guardians or parents. Problems ranging from fake documents, lack of transparency in handling funds and corruption in the adoption process, which have been reported over the years, have led to the latest round of adoption suspensions. Following similar allegations by recipient countries, the Nepali government suspended inter-country adoptions in May 2007, before lifting the self- imposed ban in January 2009. Intra-country adoptions were allowed to continue although local response to calls for adoption had always been very poor. Even after the 2007 suspension and its eventual lifting, adoption problems continued to plague the tiny kingdom in the eastern Himalayas. In February, The Hague Conference on Private International Law, an inter-governmental organisation, released a report roundly criticising Nepal’s adoption system, citing gross irregularities. In 2008, Nepal came up with the "Terms and Conditions and Process for Granting Approval for Adoption of Nepali Child by an Alien." These, however, were "not adequate as a legal framework to conduct inter-country adoptions," said the Hague Report. It added that Nepal’s refurbished laws still "fall short of Hague Convention standards." The report recommended "better regulations of children’s homes" and elimination of "financial gain from inter-country adoption." On Aug. 6, the U.S. government slapped a ban on inter-country adoptions from Nepal, citing the need "to protect the rights and interests of certain Nepali children and their families, and of U.S. prospective adoptive parents." Ten other countries – Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and Britain – had previously taken similar actions following the release of The Hague report. "A few bad apples are besmirching the image of the entire sector," says Sher Jung Karki, undersecretary of the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare. "There are mainly two problems plaguing the sector: The documentation process is shoddy, which weakens the cases even of children who genuinely qualify for adoption," says Upendra Keshari Neupane, a member of the government’s Investigation, Recommendation and Monitoring Committee on inter-country adoption. "The second is the practise by some child centres of resorting to fake documents in order to put up even unqualified children for adoption," Neupane adds. Data reveals that foster parents prefer to adopt children who are younger than three years. "The primary problem is with the huge amount of money involved," says Holmes. "When one has to pay 8,000 U.S. dollars to adopt a Nepali child, of which 5,000 dollars goes to the child care centre, there are bound to be irregularities. In Nepal, 5,000 dollars is quite a big amount." "The adoption fee has to be brought down to curb irregularities," Holmes says, adding, "a blanket suspension is not the answer to the problem." But Karki points out that Nepal’s adoption fee is quite low compared to many other countries. Institutional homes, he says, need money to take care of many other children who remain in their care. Holmes believes the Nepali government should be given the benefit of the doubt, noting that there has been some progress since authorities reopened the sector in 2009. "When I adopted my first child in 2006, I was liaising directly with the child care centre, which is wrong," Holmes says. "But I got my second child in 2009 through the central allocation system. I filed an application in May and until September, when we finally brought him home, we were not allowed to meet him." According to Article 29 of the 1993 Hague Inter-country Adoption Convention, which Nepal signed in April 2009 but has yet to ratify, direct contact between the prospective adoptive parents and the biological parents or guardians is not permitted before verification of the suitability of the child and the prospective adoptive parents. Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare spokesperson Ram Prasad Bhattarai says, "more needs to be done but things are changing." Karki echoes Bhattarai’s observation. "Things are moving forward," says Karki. "We are working to nip the problem in the bud by developing a system whereby a child can be taken in by the institutional homes only after doing a thorough check of his or her background." "We are also trying to lay down stringent punishment for those trying to turn the industry into a money-making business," Karki adds. "Right now, we can do nothing other than delisting the centre from our list of centres accredited by the ministry for inter-country adoption." Neupane believes widespread poverty is also fuelling the irregularities. Poor parents have been found colluding with institutional homes to make it appear their children are orphans, he says. "Sometimes they do it in the hope that their child will have a better future while at other times, acute poverty forces them to do this for some money," Neupane says.

.