Charities and authorities battle over number of abandoned children

Charities and authorities battle over number of abandoned children

Over 30 Romanian-centred charities have published an advertisement in the Financial Times detailing what it calls a ‘Guantanamo for babies’ in Romanian childcare, due to thousands of abandoned children.

The charity groups called for the resumption of international adoptions, but do not know the number of children abandoned.

“We as NGOs don’t have the resources to go around the country to tally the figures,” says Robin Nydes, spokesman for Charities Concerned with Children in Romania.

The Romanian Authority for Protection of Children’s Rights (ANPDC) said that 1,335 children were abandoned in 2005 and only 249 remained without parenting by the end of the year.

The charity group dismissed this as a “false substantial understatement.”

In 2004, UNICEF estimated the number of abandoned children at 9,000 in maternity wards, hospitals and paediatric wards, but has no figures for 2005.

Former EU rapporteur on Romania, Baroness Emma Nicholson, defends the recent actions of the Romanian authorities and disputes the charity’s estimate.

“Unless these abandoned children are hidden away in some secret location (perhaps the ‘secret CIA prisons’), the pro-adoption lobby should inform us where these tens of thousands of abandoned children are kept,” she said in a latter to the FT.

Nydes says many of the children are in Romanian hospitals registered as ill, not abandoned.

The advert claimed Romanian nationals “typically adopt” a small fraction of these babies, which are “confined” to steel cribs 23 hours a day for years. It also called for inter-country adoptions to be resumed if, after four months, authorities cannot find a domestic adoptive parent.

There has been a moratorium on international adoptions from Romania since 2001. Since 2004 this has been imposed.But the last European Commission Monitoring report stated that the demand for national adoptions from Romanians was higher than the number of adoptable children.

Commercial ad rates for a page in the FT can rise above 100,000 Euro, but charities can receive discount of over 75 per cent. “The ad was paid for by private sponsors,” says Nydes.

The charities have an offer from donors to fund a second advertisement due for late September 2006.

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