Cantwell visiting EU Delegation: ica before institutions (preparing Unicef position) (DRAFT BOOK)

Exact date is in book Romania for Export

CANTWELL JAN 2004

Towards the end of January, in the middle of the Nastase -Berlusconi crises, I receive

in my office Nigel Cantwell, whom Unicef considered their expert in adoptions. I had

met Nigel before and I had read his reports about intercountry adoptions in Romania.

There was quite a difference between his opinions and what he was saying in

meetings. In fact, other people that knew him shared the same impression.

Anyway, here he comes in January 2004, right after the New Year and in the middle

of the crises and he says he wants to know about the situation of intercountry

adoptions in Romania since he’d been asked by Unicef to draft a position about ica on

their behalf. That was strange. If Unicef is a UN organisation whose mission is to

promote the Convention which is so clear about it, what is to be clarified? This time,

Mr Cantwell started to argue with me giving the unprofessional argument that a child

is better off in a family abroad than in an institution at home. So, I argued back on the

basis of the Convention he was supposed to defend, namely art. 20 about continuity in

the child’s upringing. Feeling that I would never get to an end with this guy, I opened

“the Bible”: the Implementation Handbook of the UN Convention on the UN

Convention on the Rights of the Child. I had to convince someone paid by Unicef

about something which was the Unicef policy… This handbook was really good,

very explicit about the meaning of each and every article, with concrete examples

from different countries about how it should and how it should not be applied. Too

good to be promoted by Unicef in Romania. Gabriela Coman had tried hard to

convince Unicef to translate it and it took a long time to get their commitment to that.

It was rather hilarious that Unicef Moldova had translated it in Romanian by some

translators in Bucharest but Unicef Romania did not want to contribute to that cost

saying that this was not necessary in Romania since there in child protection

everybody spoke English! Anyway, it finally happened that Unicef agreed to translate

it (again?!) into Romanian. So, when I opened the handbook, the Unicef local officer

said: but we are translating ths now. She hardly finished the sentence when Nigel

suddenly shouted with big eyes staring at her: “You’re doing what? He said. We are

translating it, the Unicef girl said, but why, is that a bad thing, she went on”. “Oh,no

Cantwell said, but it’s so much work…” I was almost sure then that I could just forget

about it. And in a way, it was true for one year, the answer was the same: it is ready

it’s in printing, it will be ready in a few weeks.

.