Petition in favor of families victims of the Romanian moratorium on adoptions
Several MEPs, led by the French Claire Gibault and Jean-Marie Cavada (liberal democrats), have launched a petition in which they demand that the Romanian authorities reconsider the refusals they have opposed to some 1,000 families.
The question of international adoption in Romania gives rise to a painful battle in the European Parliament. Several MEPs, led by the French Claire Gibault and Jean-Marie Cavada (liberal democrats), have launched a petition in which they demand that the Romanian authorities reconsider the refusals they have opposed to some 1,000 families who would have been, say they, surprised by the moratorium on adoptions, which entered into force in October 2001. They hope to collect before July 6 the 367 signatures necessary for this petition to bind Parliament.
Mrs. Gibault , who specifies that she is "adoptive mother of two Togolese children" , is sorry for the fate of Romanian children who are victims of the moratorium on adoptions, when they have "established emotional relationships" with their future parents: "They must feel abandoned a second time!" , exclaims the conductor. "How are they going to rebuild themselves after such a trauma?" The Romanian authorities claim to have accepted all adoption applications (1,003) submitted before the entry into force of the moratorium and then rejected those made after. These requests concern, according to them, 1,092 children, with whom certain families have come into contact,
Christine and Alain Roques are among the couples who have been refused and do not understand why. "We applied in February 2001, but we weren't offered to meet two children until November 2003!" , says Mr. Roques. They were two brothers, Marin and Catalin, then aged 7 and 5, who lived in an orphanage. The Romanian Office for adoptions assures that it was not the authorities, but a private association which presented these two little boys to them, when it had no right to do so, since the moratorium was running. The Office is unable to say how this association was able to open the doors of the orphanage, where the couple from Aveyron went"every two months, for four days each time, with a translator" . Mrs. Roques regrets that the two children "with whom emotional ties have been established" , are now placed in a foster family.
The Romanian authorities claim to have examined, "at the request of the European Parliament" , the files of the 1,092 children on the basis of their new law: this respects the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which makes international adoption is the last resort, after returning to the biological family, integration into a foster family or national adoption. Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn says he is satisfied: "All the files have been examined and the families have been informed individually of the result."
Many MEPs oppose Mrs. Gibault 's petition : to reverse its decisions concerning the 1,092 children, Romania should modify its law and reopen the international adoption file. They fear, like the Portuguese socialist Ana Gomes, a resumption of "traffic that existed before the moratorium" , denounced by Unicef and Parliament. “A baby cost 12,000 to 20,000 euros on the unofficial adoption market ,” recalls Ms. Gomes . She is surprised that relatively unknown NGOs have recently been able to finance an advertising page in the Financial Times , which costs "around 120,000 euros" , according to Ms Gomes ,"controlled opening" of adoptions. She points out that the description of the Romanian children "takes no account of the progress made by Bucharest" .
Mrs. Gibault , on the contrary, considers the situation in Romania still very bad, "although the official statistics do not say so" : there are still 9,000 abandoned children per year, according to UNICEF, she underlines. Jean-Marie Cavada, who recalls having been a "child of the war, raised by five successive families" , deplores that these children "can no longer be rescued thanks to international adoption" . It is on the real state of child protection in Romania that the pros and the anti-adoption now risk clashing.
Rafaele Rivais