Intercountry adoption: Trafficking children

Intercountry adoption: Trafficking children Poverty and war are amongst the biggest reasons for children being put up for adoption. But times of war and social upheaval are the very moment when children should not be adopted says Nigel Cantwell, who works on adoptionissues for UNICEF. "In natural emergencies or even armed conflicts there is a very clear guideline that no intercountry adoptions must be allowed for at least two years if a child's family, its wider family, has not been traced." In the early 1990s Nigel Cantwell helped negotiate the Hague Conventionon Adoption. This was intended to promote local adoption first and then regulate intercountry adoptions. But the Convention was still in its infancy when the overwhelming political events of the early '90s shook Eastern Europe. Since then it has been open season on adoptions from those countries. "There was absolutely no experience of dealing with intercountry adoptions. It should not have been an immediate option at that time," Mr Cantwell explained. "Time is needed for the authorities to consult, to understand the issues and set up a system that's going to protect the rights and the best interests of their children." Romania was one of those East European countries. In 1991, after the fall of the Ceausescu regime, television screens around the world were flooded with pictures of scrawny children abandoned in squalor in the orphanages. There were 100,000 of them. European and American families rushed to adopt and with them came the brokers and facilitators, the people prepared to make money out of any tragic situation. Romanians like "Dan", who went into business selling the children he found as he scoured the countryside. "They can obtain a small fortune of money selling their kid," he told the BBC. According to "Dan", whatever the rules and regulations were supposed to be there was always a way round - for money. "The people in the orphanage, the director, even the medical personnel, the nurses, people in the law system, everyone who has the power to put his signature on a piece of paper can be corruptible." But the word orphanage is a very misleading term in this context. "These people abandoned their children in the orphanages but it is not a real abandonment," Mirel Bran, a Romanian journalist, explained. "Most of the parents came very often to see their children. Because they have not enough money at home they prefer to put these children in the orphanages where they can eat, they can wash, and they get a kind of an education." The children were not orphans, they were just poor. Emma Nicholson is a member of the European Parliament and its special rapporteur on Romania. "Thousands of children who left Romania at that time have vanished," she explained. "There are no records so we don't know what happened, unless they were lucky enough to go to good, caring, loving families, who are proud of them." Poverty was a problem for the Government as well as individual families. According to Emma Nicholson, intercountry adoptions brought in an estimated US$150 million a year. Since then Romania has had several attempts at sorting out the problem. A moratorium on intercountry adoption came into place in 2001. It proposed a strategy developed for fostering children within Romania, adopting locally and putting intercountry adoption at the end of a long list of alternatives.

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