A Thessaloniki appeals court has handed a lawyer a four-year suspended jail sentence on condition that he pay 3,000 euros to a children’s charity after finding him guilty of brokering illegal adoptions.

The case involves five illegal adoptions – one in 2014 and four in 2016 – where financially vulnerable women from Bulgaria were lured to come to Greece to give birth in private clinics and hand their babies up for adoption in return for a small fee.

The court found that the lawyer made over €32,000 from the adoptions, receiving payments ranging from €2,000 to 18,000 to his bank account.

The lawyer maintained his innocence throughout the trial and appeal. [AMNA]

ARC Adoption hit the milestone in December 2023.

A North East adoption agency is celebrating the momentous achievement of finding loving homes for over 300 children.

ARC Adoption North, which supports and prepares people to become approved adopted parents, achieved the milestone in December 2023.

Carly and Ashleigh, a North East based couple and now new parents, registered to start the adoption process with ARC Adoption in early 2023. After completing the preparation training and assessment process they were approved to adopt in August, before being matched with a gorgeous little boy who joined them just before Christmas.

“After going through many options to have a family together, adoption felt like it was the right thing for us and for our family," the couple said. "When thinking about the love and stability we had to give to a child, it was an easy choice to help a child in need and choose adoption.

The Impilo Partners

Danish International Adoption (DIA)

Naledi Asbl Luxembourg

Eltern fur Kinder Osterreich (EfKO)

National Adoption Coalition South Africa (NACSA)

A baby with HIV raises fears for many people. But is that right?

Reluctant
Adoption organizations are hesitant about adopting children with HIV. While orphanages in South Africa, Haiti and Eastern Europe are full of HIV-positive children. And with the right medication it is now possible to live well with HIV, and you will no longer die from it.

Unique
The adopted children portrayed by NOVA - twins of which the boy, Mandlekosi, has HIV - is unique: Wereldkinderen  is the only Dutch adoption organization with a permit for South Africa and if the medical screening shows that the child is HIV-positive , it is not eligible for adoption.

Acceptable
According to Wereldkinderen, South Africa itself is against the adoption of children with HIV. But the director of the orphanage that NOVA visits disputes this. She first tries to find a family in South Africa for all the children in the orphanage. If that does not work, foreign adoption is certainly a possibility and also permitted. According to social worker Susan Krawitz - she runs an adoption agency - the biggest obstacle lies mainly in the countries of the adoptive parents. The World Children Foundation recently found it acceptable to ask parents if they wanted to adopt children with HIV.

Internet
Adoptive families for children with HIV from all over the world are also sought via internet sites. There are now various organizations in America that promote the adoption of a HIV-positive child. An estimated 150 children with HIV are adopted there every year.

NOVA spoke to two families in the Netherlands who dared to adopt a child with HIV and went to South Africa.

Chile is no longer conducting a criminal investigation into possible child theft and illegal adoptions by a Dutch 'fake nun'. After the death of Truus Kuijpers last year, the Chilean investigating judge no longer decides whether she was guilty of this. His spokesperson told this site.

Adoption victims and interest groups are disappointed. They call on the Dutch government to conduct its own investigation, because new abuses continue to come to light about Kuijpers' adoption practices.

In Chile, a criminal investigation has been going on for years into the illegal adoptions of 20,000 children during the dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Kuijpers, who ran a children's home there and falsely posed as a nun, was one of the suspects. Chilean mothers and adoptees accuse her of stealing children for adoption in the Netherlands. This would involve at least a hundred children.

According to investigating judge Jaime Balmaceda, five hundred cases are in a final phase and six hundred have been dismissed, including Kuijpers' case. She died exactly a year ago. "Due to her death, she is no longer a suspect and no statement will be made about her possible criminal liability," said a spokesperson for Balmaceda.

Outgoing Minister Franc Weerwind (Legal Protection) sees no reason to start an investigation into illegal adoptions from Chile by a Dutch fake nun. He regrets that there have been abuses in the past, but leaves it to the authorities in Chile. He does want to talk to Chilean adoptees. He answers this to parliamentary questions from the SP.

During General Pincohet's dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, an estimated 20,000 Chilean children were illegally adopted abroad. Babies supposedly declared dead to mothers were stolen from hospitals. Children have also been taken from homes without the consent of their mothers and offered for adoption.

About two hundred Chilean children ended up in the Netherlands. At least half of those adoptions went through the Las Palmas children's home in Santiago, which was run by Truus Kuijpers. Previous research from this site shows that Kuijpers wrongly presented herself as a 'nun', sent children to the Netherlands without the knowledge of the mothers, falsified adoption documents and adopted children. later linked to wrong biological families.

Criminal investigation

Police and justice in Chile have been conducting a criminal investigation into illegal adoptions for years. Kuijpers, who denied all accusations, was also interrogated in 2019 during a visit to Chile, but she died at the beginning of this year. Her sister, with whom she founded Las Palmas, is still alive. “An investigation will have to reveal what exactly happened,” Weerwind writes in response to questions from SP MP Michiel van Nispen. 'I can't get ahead of myself.'

'Long road ahead before ending Europe and Central Asia’s long, painful legacy’ of institutionalisation of children, as new UNICEF report highlights rate of children living in residential care across region is double the global average

GENEVA, 18 January 2024 – Nearly half a million children – or 456,000 – across Europe and Central Asia live in residential care facilities, including large-scale institutions, according to a new report published today by UNICEF.

Pathways to Better Protection: taking stock of the situation of children in alternative care in Europe and Central Asia notes that the rate of children living in residential care facilities across Europe and Central Asia is double the global average, with 232 per 100,000 children living in residential care facilities compared to 105 per 100,000 globally.

“We have a long way to go before ending Europe and Central Asia’s long and painful legacy of institutionalising children. While there have been some improvements, progress has been far from equal. Children with disabilities have largely been left behind,” said Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia.

Western Europe has the highest rate of children in residential care facilities at 294 per 100,000 children – nearly triple the global average. While facilities in Western Europe tend to be small and integrated into communities, there remains an overreliance on residential care instead of family-based care. The higher rate is partly due to an increase in unaccompanied and separated children and young people seeking asylum in Europe in recent years.

Many adoptees have a trauma behind them and feel different while growing up. When the outside world does not recognize their experiences, they join together and make each other aware - it's time they get society's support, writes Susanna Johansson.

They started adopting children from non-Western countries to Sweden in the 1950s. Sweden is one of the countries that has adopted the most children in the world per capita. Most adoptions have taken place via Adoptionscentrum and some have been done privately.

For about 7-8 years, adoption issues have been raised in the public conversation and in social media via research, books and articles by adoptees who have addressed the subject. In 2021, there was an impact with a series of articles in DN about adoption.

This is precisely why I make the comparison with the consciousness-raising political conversations of the 60s, when these radical feminist women's groups needed to share their individual experiences with each other in order to understand the extent of sexualized violence in heterosexual relationships and see that it was a structural problem.

In the same way, it is only when you as an adoptee talk to other adoptees, and when adoptees raise the issue from our perspective in the public conversation, that we become aware and take a closer look at our own experiences. Precisely because our experiences can then be problematized, mirrored, understood and reflected in conversations with others with similar experiences. The experience of living apart from other adoptees in our white families can be equated to being in the grip of perpetrators, like abused women in the 60s. A situation that has often made us blind to our own living conditions, which is also reinforced by the fact that our experiences are made invisible in the Swedish discourse on adoption. Our situation has become normalized for us as individuals living in our adoptive families.

What do you do when an NGO has a monopoly on a central service and does not deliver?

When Minister of Social Affairs and Housing Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil (S) announced on Tuesday an indefinite halt to international adoption to Denmark, it gave rise to a number of questions.

Many of them cannot be answered here and now, but one of the most interesting starts from the fact that adoption is a rare, if not unique, phenomenon: a central service that has until now been 100 percent NGO-driven.

It is an area that civil society has had a monopoly on. And the interesting question is about much more than adoption.

You can put any service into the equation and ask: What do you do when the only provider of a service is a civil society organization that is no longer able or deprived of the right to provide it?

SEOUL: Born as Yoon-hwa in South Korea in 1974, she became Petra Zwart of the Netherlands at the age of one.

Her adoptive Dutch family provided a warm and welcoming home to both Zwart and her biological brother, who was adopted at the age of five.

Even so, Zwart recalls finding it difficult to fit in as a child, due to her East Asian appearance being different, “like an ugly duckling”.

She and her brother are among the nearly 170,000 babies that South Korea has sent overseas for adoption since 1953.