A plan to facilitate adoptions in France

Based on the Colombani report, the Secretaries of State for the Family, Nadine Morano, and for Foreign Affairs, Rama Yade have set up a plan to facilitate adoptions in France and abroad.

The government is finalizing a plan to facilitate adoptions in France, where too few children are adoptable, and abroad, where procedures will be reviewed to give French couples more chances, in the face of "competition from countries like Italy.

Based on the Colombani report submitted to the Elysée Palace in March, the proposals of the Secretaries of State for the Family, Nadine Morano, and for Foreign Affairs, Rama Yade, will be presented to the Council of Ministers on August 21, but the Ministers in unveiled the essentials to the press on Monday.

Reformed in 2005, the French adoption system is not working well, according to the former boss of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, whose proposals should be widely followed by the government, in particular the creation of a real Central Authority responsible for alleviating the current lack of coordination.

In the immediate future, an Interministerial Adoption Committee has been created, led by Nadine Morano, she specified. An ambassador for international adoption, Jean-Paul Moncheau, was also appointed in June.

The number of adoptions abroad fell to 3,162 in 2007 from 4,136 in 2005. The drop was 20% between 2006 and 2007, while in the same period Italy saw adoptions increase by 9%. .

It is both to support adoptive families and support aid projects for orphanages that Rama Yade announced in the presence of the actor Gérard Depardieu the sending to the embassies of the countries of adoption of "Peace Corps", young French volunteers from the French Association of Volunteers for Progress (AFVP).

The Phnom Penh embassy in Cambodia will be the first to welcome these volunteers.

Through them, it will be possible to finance, on the cooperation credits of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, projects related to abandoned children, which could accompany adoption requests.

The Colombani report had in fact noted that French associations found themselves in difficult competition with countries which do not hesitate to support requests for the adoption of financial aid in the humanitarian sector.

During the press conference, Gérard Depardieu explained that he was "a little ashamed" and that he was "shocked" by celebrities who quickly obtain the desired adoptive child, citing Johnny Halliday and Madonna.

Moreover, deemed too lax and not very uniform, the approval procedure will be "better supervised", according to Ms. Morano. Nearly 8,000 approvals are issued each year and 30,000 French families held them in 2006.

Information and training for families will be made compulsory, and orientation and adoption counseling consultations (COCA) will go from 15 throughout the country to one per region.

National adoption will also be developed. Concerning children born secretly or abandoned, it is very limited: 706 children adopted in France in 2007, against 3,600 in 1995.

In 2006, out of 23,000 children placed after a judge's decision, 219 judicial requests for abandonment were pronounced, according to Ms. Morano, after declaration by the social services that the child is "abandoned".

The procedure for declaring abandonment will be simplified, and the public prosecutor's office will be able to submit a request for a declaration of abandonment to the court.

But the subject is sensitive. Admittedly, when the abandonment is declared after years in foster families, the child is often too big to be adopted. But many social workers are reluctant to break family ties, and fear the separation of siblings when one of the children is adopted.

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