Flemish Government will translate political agreement on reform of intercountry adoption into concrete action plan

Last week, the Flemish Government concluded a political agreement that should lay the foundation for an ambitious reform of the Flemish legislation on intercountry adoption. The Flemish Government has decided today that it will accept the expert panel's proposal to draw up a concrete action plan to guarantee that future intercountry adoptions take place correctly and ethically. Minister responsible Wouter Beke: 'This plan will be drawn up in close consultation with the stakeholders. The Growing Up Agency has already made the first contacts for this. Hearings in parliament will also start next week. I'm looking forward to the debate.'

The action plan will contain the following guidelines:

There is still a future for intercountry adoption in Flanders , always in the interest of the child;

' Multi-parenting ' is an important basic idea in adoption, which means, among other things, that 'first parents' remain involved as much as possible;

We are strengthening cooperation with the countries of origin ;

Flanders will go on site to the countries with which cooperation can be initiated after a risk analysis or new cooperation can be sought, in order to arrive at intense agreements. Cooperation with countries that show some unreliability will be resolutely stopped;

We reverse the adoption procedure. At the child level, the system will be guided by the request from the countries of origin to place children within the agreements made. We are anchoring the working method around which good practices already exist with a number of countries of origin in the operation of intercountry adoption . Within intercountry adoption this approach is called the 'reversed flow' ;

We will make foster care and adoption more closely intertwined . Of course there are differences between adoption and foster care, but if we start from the need of many children for care in a family context, then we must seize every opportunity to give children a care perspective, and that is why it is important to also consider foster care and adoption. to connect;

We are strengthening the existing aftercare policy.

Flemish minister Beke: 'This is a file that all parties involved have been saying for many years that we must tackle it. Partly due to the support of the many adoptive children and the understanding of adoptive parents and candidate parents for our choice to even more strongly exclude abuses, which often cause them a lot of worries later on, we are sticking our necks out to now work on an ambitious reform. The new Flemish adoption legislation must be in place within two years.'

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