■ Two years in prison for baby smuggling in Romania :A baby for $6,000
■ Two years in prison for baby smuggling in Romania
:A baby for $6,000
Bucharest (taz) – The British media were shocked by the “harsh verdict” and defended the Mooney couple. They only wanted to free orphans from a miserable life - now they have to go behind Romanian bars for their good intentions.
In Romania, on the other hand, the British couple attracted little pity - but their case caused even more of a stir: while trying to smuggle the three-month-old baby Monica across the Hungarian-Romanian border, which they had previously bought for $6,000, Adrian and Bernadette Mooney caught. Last Friday, a Bucharest court sentenced the couple to 24 months in prison for illegal border crossing and illegal adoption. The parents, Florin Baiaram and Florina Dimir, both 17 years old, each received a one-year prison sentence, which they will have to serve when they come of age. The broker of the deal, an acquaintance of the parents, has to be behind bars for 28 months.
Although the two Brits are the first foreigners to be convicted of child trafficking in Romania, the adoption business is booming. After the relevant legal regulations were generously relaxed in the summer of 1990, the Romanian Ministry of Justice registered around 10,000 adoptions abroad in the following 12 months - a third of all adoptions in the world. However, the authorities once again put a stop to the “child transfer”, which was only loosely controlled by the state-run “Romanian Committee for Adoptions” (CRA): foreign citizens are now only allowed to adopt children who are on the CRA’s list, and only then if no Romanian parents have been found for them within six months.
Child trafficking is now illegal. In southern Hungary, for example, two years ago the police discovered a Romanian smuggling ring that was selling Romanian children to western countries. According to the Romanian Ministry of Justice, traffickers also use legal tricks to obtain adoption papers. Under the pretext that these are children suffering from AIDS or disabled and therefore in need of humanitarian aid, in reality healthy children are being “exported”.
There is no end in sight to such practices for the time being. The “demand” in the West is great – as is the poverty in Romania. It causes parents to sell their children to traffickers because they can no longer care for them, and the situation in Romanian children's homes, where, according to an estimate by the CRA, more than 100,000 orphans live, is catastrophic. Already notorious under Ceaușescu for their prison-like conditions, little has changed so far. Due to the economic crisis, they receive hardly any money from the state, the staff is underpaid and mostly unqualified. Many children prefer to escape from the home: tens of thousands of children are currently living on Romania's streets.
The Mooneys also defended themselves in court, arguing that they wanted to give little Monica a better life. However, the judge “wanted to set an example” with the verdict. The couple's lawyer, Ioana Floca, said the two were in "pretty bad condition." Now the Mooneys' parents want to go to Romania and personally ask President Iliescu for mercy. According to Adrian Mooney's father, he doubts that his son will survive a Romanian prison.KENO VERSECK