Opinion My position on inter country adoptions Author: Baroness Emma Nicholson

Successive Romanian governments have made it clear that Inter-Country Adoptions (ICA) are no longer permitted. The decision to ban ICA came about because the market in children – following the 1997 legislation on adoption – led to rampant corruption. This corruption severely impacted on child healthcare and development in Romania. The ban was also connected to the fact that Romania has fundamentally reformed its child welfare system and is now in a position to provide family-based care for children who can not, for whatever reason, be brought up by their own family. Romania is also in a position to share its experience of child welfare reform with those countries which have not yet started that long and difficult road.

Despite the ban, which has been held up firmly by Prime Minister Tariceanu as well as the Justice Minister, Monica Macovei and President Basescu, continual pressure is being exerted on the Romanian government from a number of sources – the US Congress in particular and organisations of adoptive parents, behind whom the adoption agencies are hiding. The pro-ICA lobby is well financed, cleverly organised and manages to remain invisible as their spokespersons are not paid PR people but passionate would-be parents, whose adoption files have been put on hold. For anyone studying PR or communications at university, the workings of the ICA lobby would make a fascinating subject.

Why is the ICA lobby so desperate to repeal Romania’s child rights legislation and re-introduce international adoptions? I have two answers. The obvious response is that there are many American families, and adoption agencies, who are well connected with their Congressmen, with the State Department and with the White House, and they have managed to make this an issue in bilateral relations between the US and Romania. This is not an unusual turn of events in US politics, in which lobbyists are increasingly able to influence policy.

A more interesting answer is that the ICA lobby is afraid what Romania has done with their ban on adoptions; they are setting a bad example. Not only has the ICA trade been stopped from Romania but the country has managed to reform its child welfare system, get most of the children out of institutions back to their families, or placed with foster families – and prevent infants from entering institutions in the first place. This is not following the pro-ICA script, which is that Romania, and all other “source” countries, are in chaos and are unable to take care of their own children. According to the ICA propaganda machine the only solution for children in difficulty in these countries is that they be adopted by families in the US and other Western countries. What the ICA lobby is particularly afraid of is that other “source” countries, particularly Russia, Moldova and Ukraine, will follow Romania’s example, reform their child welfare systems, find local solutions for their children in difficulty and stop international adoptions. This would be bad for business.

Personally, I would like to move on from the ICA issue. I consider this particular battle to have been fought and won – certainly as regards Romania, where the abuses were at their worst – and Romania has proven its determination to stand firm in the face of intense pressure to repeal its child rights legislation and reintroduce ICA. There are so many other issues to deal with; so many other problems that need addressing both in Romania and elsewhere. I am also deeply concerned about the plight of the Marsh Arabs in Iraq and Iran, the victims of the earthquake in Pakistan (see page 11 – ed.), the long suffering people in Afghanistan, not to mention the Palestinians. As Vice Chairman of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, scores of other issues come across my desk.

However, the ICA lobby will not let me move on. They continue to vilify me as the bete noir who is running a personal campaign to ban all adoptions and they come up with the most fantastic claims about my influence that it would be amusing were these issues not so serious. I am portrayed as some sort of viceroy of Romania whose powers over the government (as well as the European institutions) exceeds those of any elected official in existence. Quite how a former Rapporteur of the European Parliament controls the government of Romania is a mystery to me, and to anyone rational who knows about the real situation. Yet these claims are directed at badly informed parents in the West who are in no position to find out for themselves what the actual situation is.

It is a well known fact that a successful political lobby campaign must have a bete noir, a hate figure, as this is the best way of unifying your supporters behind a simple message, or rallying support and concentrating fire on one target individual. The fact that Romania’s adoption ban (implemented by the former Romanian government and sustained by the present one) was based on an independent sociological study carried out by the respected IMAS agency, and that numerous studies about the negative effect of ICA (including one by USAID in 2001) are ignored. The ICA lobby simply connects individual families who have been unable to adopt with gullible journalists, and a sensational story soon emerges about one family’s struggle with the Romanian bureaucracy and the “English Baroness” – and in tabloid terms it all makes for good copy.

What is also ignored is that the European Commission criticised Romania’s adoption legislation and requested it be brought in line with the UN Convention on Children’s rights and practices in the EU Member States – where intercountry adoptions are the extreme exception. An independent panel of EU member state experts on family law was appointed by the European Commission to assist Romania’s legislation. This independent panel’s findings were fully in line with the opinions I have always expressed. But of course it is easier to criticise a Member of the European Parliament, an English Baroness, than a group of EU experts (including judges).

To be fair, the international and Romanian media have been quite objective about the ICA issue since the introduction of child rights legislation in 2004 (legislation which upheld the moratorium on international adoptions that was imposed in 2001). Positive articles about Romania’s progress in reforming its child welfare system have been seen in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Sunday Times and the leading Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. International news agencies such as AP and AFP have also reported objectively on this issue and have succeeded in getting the word out that the ICA issue has been resolved in Romania. The Romanian media have also shown remarkable objectivity in covering this issue and resisting the temptations of peddling the messages of the pro-ICA lobby.

Most of the communications that goes on regarding the ICA lobby takes place on various Internet forums – a public space with no editorial control and often without the basic journalistic practice of looking at both sides of a story. There are also some obscure and local publications which have taken up the ICA banner and continue to promote its agenda. There is an interesting example of one of these publications in Romania – Bucharest Daily News.

Eager to find a niche in Romania’s dynamic media market, Bucharest Daily News (an English language newspaper) decided to publish a large article in February which presented the pro-ICA point of view in some detail. The pro-ICA lobby, who monitor the Romanian media on a daily basis, were quick to hijack this newspapers agenda and feed them with enough material to keep the story alive. The interesting thing is that I am really not sure that the Bucharest Daily News is aware that they are being used by the lobby.

I saw an email dated 4th February 2006 from one of the most active lobbyists in Europe, Vali Nas, who writes continually for the pro-ICA Internet forums. His advice to this particular ICA forum was as follows: “I would suggest that each of you consider the possibility of sending the ‘Bucharest Daily News’ a message in which you could: 1) express your thanks for such a well balanced series of articles on the delicate issue of inter country adoptions and, 2) detail your own ‘pipeline case’ (if you are a waiting family) or share your own happy adoption story ….”

In this way, those parents who had been unable to adopt from Romania were mobilised and Bucharest Daily News were inundated with “spontaneous” emails from concerned parents who were both praising the article and stating their case. This was unprecedented for the paper and another double page spread of pro-ICA “readers letters” was presented.

Subsequently, the Daily News was “spontaneously” contacted by a couple of Members of the European Parliament who are vehemently pro-ICA. I was then contacted by the paper with an extraordinary list of questions including the following: “several members of the European Parliament contacted our newsroom in order to underline the fact that your anti-international adoption outlook is not shared by all the MEPs.” I was staggered by this question as surely no journalist believes that a motion can pass any parliament unanimously. Surely everyone knows that such things are only possible in a dictatorship. Any legislation or policy is subject to a debate and a sometimes fierce difference of opinion. In the European Parliament we have never had sustained unanimity on any issue and I don’t suppose we ever will.

I was then asked a series of questions about the so-called “pipeline cases” but as this issue has been resolved some years ago I declined to answer. What people don’t realise is that the genuine pipeline cases – in other words applications for adoptions that had been made before the moratorium came into effect in 2001 – were all resolved in favour of the foreign adoptive parents some time ago. All remaining applications to adopt Romanian children were submitted after the moratorium came into effect and they were never accepted as valid applications by any Romanian authority. It is these invalid cases that form the basis of the vociferous pro-ICA lobby.

The truth is there was so much corruption and confusion during the 11 years of international adoption in Romania (1990 to 2001) that nobody has a full record of the cases of abuse concerning the estimated 30,000 children that were sent abroad. Between 1990 and 1994 in particular, records of foreign adoptions are very patchy. Indeed, a proper monitoring system would never have been accepted by the international adoption agencies, as “efficient” ICA is carried out without a system.

I would like to conclude by inviting anyone who is interested in making an objective assessment of this issue to consider studying the following reports, all of which are objective and based on hard facts and good field research. In these reports you can see the considered opinions of academics and professional researchers into the international adoption situation in Romania during the 1990s, and you will realise that I was not the only one who was against it.

Reference documents on Inter Country Adoptions, all of which describe the commercial nature of the Intercountry Adoption market in Romania, during the 1990s, and all of which propose major reforms of the child welfare system (which was subsequently carried out):

Report on Intercountry Adoptions in Romania. By USAID consultants Michael W. Ambrose and Anna Mary Coburn. 22nd January 2001

The Paradox of Intercountry Adoptions: Analysing Romania’s experience as a sending country. Jonathan Dickens, University of East Anglia. Published by Blackwell 2002.

Reorganisation of the System of International Adoptions and Child Protection for Children in Difficulty. Written by a committee of nine Romanian and EU experts appointed by the Romanian Prime Minister. March 2002.

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne is a Member of the European Parliament for South East England and is a member of the European Liberal Democrats. Her website address is www.emmanicholson.org.uk She is currently Vice President of the Committee of Foreign Affairs at the European Parliament, as well as shadow Rapporteur for Romania for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe. Prior to the last European Election, Baroness Nicholson was the European Parliament’s Rapporteur for Romania.

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