Haiti Orphan Appeal: "I am no orphan" says 8 year old transportee

Haiti Orphan Appeal: "I am no orphan" says 8 year old transportee

Jan 31, 2010 08:25 PM

Haiti Orphan Appeal: "I am no orphan" says 8 year old abductee

See also Americans arrested: children brought to SOS, Children in "trafficking" photos traumaticised state of trafficked children.

Although the ten American arrested for illegal transportation of children are reported as claiming that the children were all orphans from an orphanage in Haiti, the story told by the children contradicts this strongly.

Haiti Orphan Appeal: "I am no orphan" said one 8 year old transportee. Her mother had told her she was going off on a short holiday. The family of five others has arrived at the SOS Children's Villages with leaflets they had been given when their child was taken, promising a better life with a swimming pool and tennis courts. Some of these children obviously still have parents who appear to have been persuaded to hand over their children under false pretenses. The allegations have to be thoroughly investigated but the Haitian police consider this incident as organised child trafficking. The group runs an adoption camp in the Dominican Republic where prospective parents can come and stay while formal adoption papers are arranged.

SOS Children have repeated spoken out since the disaster about gross exaggeration of the number of earthquake orphans and cautioning against wholesale evacuation and adoption. These kind of unauthorised removals of children with family from Haiti confirm our view.

This incident again highlights the absolute necessity to provide appropriate care and protection especially for children in emergency situations. As urged recently in a joint statement by members of the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child’s Working Group on Children without Parental Care (Geneva) and the NGO Committee on UNICEF Working Group on Children without Parental Care (New York), all stakeholders (the Government of Haiti, as well as all local, national and international governmental and non-governmental agencies) must prevent unnecessary separation of families, inept and potentially harmful evacuation efforts and prevent the trafficking of children through inappropriate or unlawful inter-country adoptions in emergency situations. The UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, the first international document on the care of children without parental care in non-emergency and emergency situations, provides clear guidance on how to act in such exceptional circumstances. Why these UN Guidelines (which SOS took a major part in drawing up) are being ignored is unclear.