Adoption Suspension Leaves Children in Limbo

Adoption Suspension Leaves Children in Limbo By Bhuwan Sharma KATHMANDU, Sep 10, 2010 (IPS) - A big question marks looms over the future of many Nepali children in various child homes in the country in the wake of the suspension by 11 countries of their child adoption programmes for this Himalayan nation. "Children will now have to remain in grim orphanages or may risk a worse fate by staying with families that don’t want them," says Philip Holmes, the adoptive father of two Nepali children and country director of Esther Benjamins Trust-Nepal, a U.K.-registered charity engaged in childcare and child protection and fighting child trafficking in Nepal. Some 400 Nepali children are adopted by foster parents each year from 44 institutional homes accredited by the country’s Ministry for Women, Children and Social Welfare. There is no data available on the number of Nepali children given up for adoption yearly. Besides orphans, Nepali law permits inter-country adoption for voluntarily committed children, who have been surrendered to a child welfare home, orphanage or Bal Mandir, a national children’s organisation, by either their guardians or parents. Problems ranging from fake documents, lack of transparency in handling funds and corruption in the adoption process, which have been reported over the years, have led to the latest round of adoption suspensions. Following similar allegations by recipient countries, the Nepali government suspended inter-country adoptions in May 2007, before lifting the self- imposed ban in January 2009. Intra-country adoptions were allowed to continue although local response to calls for adoption had always been very poor. Even after the 2007 suspension and its eventual lifting, adoption problems continued to plague the tiny kingdom in the eastern Himalayas. In February, The Hague Conference on Private International Law, an inter-governmental organisation, released a report roundly criticising Nepal’s adoption system, citing gross irregularities. In 2008, Nepal came up with the "Terms and Conditions and Process for Granting Approval for Adoption of Nepali Child by an Alien." These, however, were "not adequate as a legal framework to conduct inter-country adoptions," said the Hague Report. It added that Nepal’s refurbished laws still "fall short of Hague Convention standards." The report recommended "better regulations of children’s homes" and elimination of "financial gain from inter-country adoption." On Aug. 6, the U.S. government slapped a ban on inter-country adoptions from Nepal, citing the need "to protect the rights and interests of certain Nepali children and their families, and of U.S. prospective adoptive parents." Ten other countries – Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and Britain – had previously taken similar actions following the release of The Hague report. "A few bad apples are besmirching the image of the entire sector," says Sher Jung Karki, undersecretary of the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare. "There are mainly two problems plaguing the sector: The documentation process is shoddy, which weakens the cases even of children who genuinely qualify for adoption," says Upendra Keshari Neupane, a member of the government’s Investigation, Recommendation and Monitoring Committee on inter-country adoption. "The second is the practise by some child centres of resorting to fake documents in order to put up even unqualified children for adoption," Neupane adds. Data reveals that foster parents prefer to adopt children who are younger than three years. "The primary problem is with the huge amount of money involved," says Holmes. "When one has to pay 8,000 U.S. dollars to adopt a Nepali child, of which 5,000 dollars goes to the child care centre, there are bound to be irregularities. In Nepal, 5,000 dollars is quite a big amount." "The adoption fee has to be brought down to curb irregularities," Holmes says, adding, "a blanket suspension is not the answer to the problem." But Karki points out that Nepal’s adoption fee is quite low compared to many other countries. Institutional homes, he says, need money to take care of many other children who remain in their care. Holmes believes the Nepali government should be given the benefit of the doubt, noting that there has been some progress since authorities reopened the sector in 2009. "When I adopted my first child in 2006, I was liaising directly with the child care centre, which is wrong," Holmes says. "But I got my second child in 2009 through the central allocation system. I filed an application in May and until September, when we finally brought him home, we were not allowed to meet him." According to Article 29 of the 1993 Hague Inter-country Adoption Convention, which Nepal signed in April 2009 but has yet to ratify, direct contact between the prospective adoptive parents and the biological parents or guardians is not permitted before verification of the suitability of the child and the prospective adoptive parents. Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare spokesperson Ram Prasad Bhattarai says, "more needs to be done but things are changing." Karki echoes Bhattarai’s observation. "Things are moving forward," says Karki. "We are working to nip the problem in the bud by developing a system whereby a child can be taken in by the institutional homes only after doing a thorough check of his or her background." "We are also trying to lay down stringent punishment for those trying to turn the industry into a money-making business," Karki adds. "Right now, we can do nothing other than delisting the centre from our list of centres accredited by the ministry for inter-country adoption." Neupane believes widespread poverty is also fuelling the irregularities. Poor parents have been found colluding with institutional homes to make it appear their children are orphans, he says. "Sometimes they do it in the hope that their child will have a better future while at other times, acute poverty forces them to do this for some money," Neupane says.

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