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Senator calls for agency to assist 20 adoptions from Vietnam

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Senator calls for agency to assist 20 adoptions from Vietnam

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Leaving no child behind

AGENCY FOR SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT VISION - NEWS



Leaving no child behind 

On 23-24 September 2009 NASO participated in the seminar Leaving No Child Behind, which took place in Bansko and which had high in its agenda the topics about the way the structural funds could facilitate the deinstitutionalization process in Bulgaria. The event was attended by representatives of the European and Bulgarian authorities, municipalities and NGOs:
- Carsten Rasmussen- Chair of the seminar- Deputy Head of Unit 12- “Structural and Cohesion Funds in Bulgaria”, Directorate General for Regional Policy in cooperation with Bulgarian Authorities (MRDPW and Association of Municipalities) 
- Luk Zelderloo, European Association of service providers for persons with disabilities 
- Judith Klein, Director of Open Society Mental Health Initiation 
- Laura Parker, Managing Director, ARK Bulgaria 
- Georgette Mulheir, Director of Operation, The Children's High Level Group
- Sorin Brasoveanu, Director of Social Services, Bacau county, Romania.

The tasks of the Inter-ministerial working group established in Bulgaria were presented by:
- Mrs. Mariana Cordova, Chairwoman of the Inter-ministerial working group, Council of Ministers 
- Mrs. Lilyana Pavlova, Deputy Minister of Regional Development and Public Works and Head of OPRD Managing Authority
- Mrs. Valentina Simeonova- Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy 
- Mr Krassimir Popov- Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy and Head of OPHRD Managing Authority

One of the most important outcomes of the seminar was the meeting conducted in between Mr. Krassimir Popov- Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy and Head of OPHRD Managing Authority on one hand, and on the other hand- Mr. Luk Zelderloo and Mr. Georgi Georgiev- President of NASO. During the meeting they discussed the possibilities for NASO to officially join the Inter-ministerial group formed by the representatives of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works, the State Agency for Child Protection, the Association of Municipalities and the Deputy Prime Minister.  

Doctors And Nurses 'Sold Hundreds Of Babies'

Doctors And Nurses 'Sold Hundreds Of Babies'

9:25am UK, Tuesday September 22, 2009

A baby-selling ring made up of doctors, nurses and welfare workers has gone on trial in northern Vietnam accused of selling more than 250 children for adoption.

US officials accuse Vietnam of failing to police its adoption system

The sixteen defendants are charged with "abuse of power and authority" and face up to 10 years in prison.

16 on trial in Vietnam adoption scandal

16 on trial in Vietnam adoption scandal

AFPSEPTEMBER 22, 2009

HANOI - Sixteen people accused of falsifying papers for adoption went on trial in Vietnam on Tuesday, in a case that raised fears of international human trafficking, a court official and local media said.

Among the accused are two directors of social welfare centres in northern Nam Dinh province, Thanh Nien newspaper reported. Doctors, nurses and local officials are also on trial, it said.

They are accused of "abuse of power in the exercise of their public missions", a court official in Nam Dinh said, requesting anonymity.

Vietnamese adoptions face scrutiny

Vietnamese adoptions face scrutiny

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Adoptions from Vietnam may not be recognised, says board

Monday, September 21, 2009 Adoptions from Vietnam may not be recognised, says board Related » Vietnamese adoptions face scrutiny | 21/09/2009 In this section » Senior Anglo executives borrowed nearly €22m from bank Sam has no need for sat nav as Kerry take scenic route to title CAROL COULTER Legal Affairs Editor THE ADOPTION Board has warned prospective adoptive parents that any planned foreign adoptions from Vietnam have no special status here and may not be recognised under Irish law. The board sent out the notice last week, warning prospective adopters that any application to adopt from Vietnam would be examined to ensure it complied with Irish adoption law, and would be decided on a case-by-case basis. According to a notice from the Minister for Children, Barry Andrews, on the website of the Adoption Board last June, the mediation licence of the Irish adoption agency operating in Vietnam, Helping Hands, has been revoked by the Vietnamese government. This follows the expiry of a bilateral agreement with Vietnam last May. Although talks had been taking place with the Vietnamese government about an interim agreement, such an agreement has been put on hold by Mr Andrews, pending the consideration of two UN reports by his department. In the absence of an agreement, no legal adoptions can be processed in Vietnam. The two UN reports follow the publication of a highly critical US report on adoption in Vietnam in April of last year. Among the abuses it found were instances where children were described as “deserted” when their parents could be found and identified, unexplained pockets of “desertions” in certain areas and payments to the birth parents of “relinquished” children, though these are outlawed by Vietnamese law. The problem it identified was the autonomy of local officials, and the inability of the central authority in Vietnam, the Department of International Adoption (DIA), to police what happens at local level. These concerns are reiterated in the two reports at present under consideration by the Minister. One of them, an unpublished draft report carried out by the UN’s International Social Service (ISS) in co-operation with the Vietnamese authorities, is highly critical of the Helping Hands agency, whose public information it describes as “at least somewhat misleading and consequently disturbing in its implications”. The ISS draws attention specifically to the fact that the fee to the agency for an adoption from Vietnam is $11,100, while the official Vietnamese fees are less than $200. The Helping Hands agency told the ISS that of the $11,100, $2,100 went on administration and $9,000 in “humanitarian aid”. The figure of $11,100 included a recent increase of $1,000. The ISS report comments: “We wonder in what form and by which entity of the Vietnamese authorities Helping Hands had been advised of such an increase, whether any explanation had been given and whether the increase related to ‘fees’ or ‘aid’.” The unpublished draft report added: “We were unfortunately not able to obtain this information within the time-frame of this assessment.” The information may be contained in the final report when it is published. When asked by The Irish Times to comment on the ISS report, the chief executive of Helping Hands, Sharon O’Driscoll, said she had nothing to say, but a spokesman would be in contact later this week. Analysis, page 5 This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

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Creditors vote to revive Imagine adoption agency

Creditors vote to revive Imagine adoption agency

Mon, September 21, 2009

By PATRICK MALONEY, LONDON FREE PRESS

The hundreds of families stunned by the collapse of an international-adoption agency have renewed hope today, after voting overwhelmingly to re-start the organization.

The Imagine Adoption creditors, which includes the would-be adoptive families, voted 248-20 at a meeting Monday to approve the agency’s proposed restructuring — a plan that will cost each family $4,000 but promises to finish a process some started as long as two years ago.

VICTIMS OF URUGUAY ADOPTION LAW: THE CHILDREN

VICTIMS OF URUGUAY ADOPTION LAW: THE CHILDREN

Interview With President of Montevideo Institute of Bioethics

By Carmen Elena Villa

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, SEPT. 21, 2009 (Zenit.org).- This month, after having legalized the union of same-sex couples in 2007, Uruguay became the first Latin American country to allow homosexual couples to adopt.

The law, which polls show is rejected by the great majority of Uruguayans, is an offense to human nature, according to Uruguayan lawyer Gustavo Ordoqui Castilla.

Some Chinese parents say their babies were stolen for adoption

Some Chinese parents say their babies were stolen for adoption

By Barbara Demick

September 20, 2009

Some Chinese parents say their babies were stolen for adoption In some rural areas, instead of levying fines for violations of China's child policies, greedy officials took babies, which would each fetch $3,000 om adoptions. Chinese parents tell of abducted children A young Chinese girl pines for her twin Graphic: Chinese adoptions Photos: Reunited in Beijing Adopted teen finds answers, mystery in China By Barbara Demick September 19, 2009 E-mailPrint Share Text Size reporting from Tianxi, China - The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: "Bring out the baby." Yang wept and argued, but, alone with her 4-month-old daughter, she was in no position to resist the man every parent in Tianxi feared. "I'm going to sell the baby for foreign adoption. I can get a lot of money for her," he told the sobbing mother as he drove her with the baby to an orphanage in Zhenyuan, a nearby city in the southern province of Guizhou. In return, he promised that the family wouldn't have to pay fines for violating China's one-child policy. Then he warned her: "Don't tell anyone about it." For five years, she kept the terrible secret. "I didn't understand that they didn't have the right to take our babies," she said. 

Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States. The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China's restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls. But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping -- sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned. Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages. "Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products," said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States. Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community. "In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money," said Ina Hut, who last month resigned as the head of the Netherlands' largest adoption agency out of concern about baby trafficking. The Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs, the government agency that oversees foreign and domestic adoption, rejected repeated requests for comment.