The CDA in Zaanstad wants to know whether the involvement of a French investor in Zaan youth care is detrimental to the quality of the care.

The mental health care provider has come into French hands and the fear is that the profit is more important than the care.

CDA member Nick Hendriks wants to know whether Zaanstad notices that the practitioner is in the hands of a company that has nothing to do with care, and also whether other institutions active in the Zaan region are owned by investment companies.

Research has shown that complex healthcare in particular is disadvantaged if assistance becomes an investment object. Hendriks also wants to see that translated to the Zaan situation.

If the situation requires it, the CDA wants Zaanstad to make new agreements with the care institutions together with the other municipalities in the region. A way must always be found to prevent young people asking for help from being told no.

The sector is such a popular target for these locust capitalists because of the good chances of high returns

By: Lilian Marijnissen and Peter Kwint

Our youth services are not doing well. In recent years – after a decentralization under Rutte-2 that was accompanied by a major cutback – youth care has become more expensive, waiting lists have grown and the staff shortage has increased. Half of all newly trained youth care workers will leave the sector within two years. The youth care workers will go on strike next Monday, in protest against the increasing workload and the rapidly growing staff shortage.

Nevertheless, the sector is very popular in some places. Private equity funds – so-called springcock capitalists or venture capitalists, depending on who you ask – see youth care as 'an interesting growth market'. For example, the mental health organization Mentaal Beter recently fell into the hands of the French investment company Apax. Another provider was taken over by Holland Capital. Apax owns companies worth a billion or 50. They owned De Persgroep, Tommy Hilfiger and the software company Exact. Clearly people with a passion for youth care. The fact that they use youth care as a profit model is not a natural phenomenon, but a consequence of allowing the market in youth care. We also see this happening in elderly care and childcare, where private equity is now the order of the day.

The earnings model of these looters roughly consists of three possibilities. You can buy a company with borrowed money, hang that debt on the company, sell profitable parts and bankrupt the rest, you can add as much value as possible to a company in the short term and then sell it for a profit, or you can skim dividends , briefly summarized. You can find all kinds of things about that and we have previously seen at V&D and childcare organization Estro what consequences this can have.

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German citizen thanks his mother for never giving up searching for him

By Lee Hyo-jin

Benjamin Joon went missing in January 1981 at the age of three at Suwon Bus Terminal in Gyeonggi Province, while travelling with his father. The two were holding hands, but the next minute, they were separated.

That is the only memory Joon has of Korea.

"My blind father was unable to find me and didn't inform my mother, who was living apart from him at that time. Someone must have found me at the terminal and brought me to the city hall of Suwon," Joon, 45, told the Korea Times in a recent interview.

Adoptions DRC: from June 10 all adopted children in the Congo by Italian families are at home by their parents. (6/17/2016)

Printable Version Report page

Great news and a great satisfaction.

All adopted children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Italian families were able to hug their parents and start a new life journey together.

The Commission expresses its joy because the intense work done in these two years, which saw Italy protagonist, made it possible to reach, in agreement with the authorities of the DRC, this beautiful result.

Cape Town – Four people are expected to appear in the Botshabelo Magistrate's Court, in the Free State, on Monday on charges of illegal adoption and fraud.

According to the provincial spokesperson for the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks), Warrant Officer Fikiswa Matoti, the first two suspects were arrested on Friday, March 17, and the other two the following day

Matoti said the two suspects arrested on Friday were arrested by the Botshabelo police for illegal adoption and fraud.

The suspects are aged 35 and 51.

“It is alleged that two females, a Lesotho national and a South African, went to Botshabelo Home Affairs for late registration applications for two children, aged 5 and 15.

The imposition of a child protection measure by the court is drastic for parents and children. Children and families must be protected if the government decides to intervene in family life. The government must therefore adhere to the principles of the rule of law and to the rules laid down in international treaties. Government decisions must include legal protection for children and families. They must therefore be able to challenge government decisions and actions.

Image of Adriana van Dooijeweert

Image: © Bas de Meijer

Concerns from the internet consultation

The internet consultation and the RSJ advice of 2021 show that there are concerns about the rule of law and legal protection, specifically with regard to the different organization of powers as proposed in the Future scenario for child and family protection. To investigate this, the clients; the Minister for Legal Protection, the State Secretary for Health, Welfare and Sport and Alderman Hendrickx, on behalf of the VNG, instructed the Advisory Committee on Legal Protection and the Rule of Law to issue an advisory report.

All Member States have national provisions governing the recognition of adoption orders, but legal procedures differ significantly across the EU. As legislation currently stands, there is no legal protection or guarantee that domestic adoptions carried out in one EU Member State will be recognised in another. This means that European families who move to another Member State after adopting a child may face significant practical problems, and may be obliged to go through national recognition procedures or even to re-adopt their child. The situation leads to legal uncertainty and may harm children’s rights, including the right to family life, non-discrimination, inheritance rights and the right to nationality.

Substantive family law is an area of national competence, but the EU may adopt measures on aspects of family law with cross-border implications. Parliament adopted a resolution on improving adoption law in 1996. In 2009, the European Commission and the European Parliament both issued studies showing that there was public support and further scope for EU action on adoption of children and putting forward concrete recommendations. The European Parliament subsequently adopted a Resolution on international adoption in the European Union, which called for consideration of coordinated European level strategies and mutual legal recognition of the documents necessary for adoption. This EP Resolution has not so far been followed by a legislative initiative by the European Commission.

During the European Parliament’s eighth term, its Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) issued a legislative initiative report on cross-border recognition of adoptions with specific recommendations to the Commission (rapporteur, Tadeusz ZWIEFKA, EPP, Poland). The preparatory work highlighted that whilst the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption requires automatic recognition of adoptions, it only applies to situations where adoptive parents and the adopted child come from two different countries and does not cover domestic adoptions, i.e. situations where the adopters complete the adoption procedure in one Member State, and then later, decide to move to another EU Member State with the child. In addition, the Brussels II Regulation does not cover adoption or the recognition of adoption orders. Therefore, at the EU level, there is currently no legal instrument, which regulates the recognition of an adoption order made in another Member State.

The European Added Value Assessment (EAVA) accompanying the report analysed possible policy options and the potential additional value of taking legislative action at the EU level. It estimated that, as well as the social, health and fundamental rights consequences for individuals, the cost of the lack of EU rules on automatic recognition of adoption decisions is approximately €1.65 million per annum. It argues that EU legislation would reduce administrative and legal costs and allow for better protection of the interests of the child and of the fundamental rights of adoptive parents. Any EU legislation should cover: issues of jurisdiction and conflict of law; a uniform certification process and adoption certificate, as well as the effects of certification; conditions for recognition of adoption orders; a principle of mutual recognition as a default principle; and grounds for non-recognition.

The subsequent European Parliament resolution of 2 February 2017 with recommendations to the Commission on cross border aspects of adoptions, based on the own-initiative legislative report:

Ethica's Advisory Board

Lezli Adams

Birth mother

Jane Aronson, M.D.

International Pediatric Health Services, NY

Shariya Small was 14 when she gave birth to triplets in 2020.

The infants, born at 26 weeks gestation, spent over five months in the neonatal intensive care unit at Indianapolis’ Community Hospital North, where Small, only in eighth grade at the time, met nurse Katrina Mullen.

“She’d be there alone for days at a time sitting at her babies’ bedside,” Mullen, 45, told TODAY.com, noting that Small refused to share information about her personal life. It wasn’t until Mullen revealed that she, too, had been a teen mom that a relationship between the pair began to bud.

“That’s when we really developed trust,” said the nurse, who has five children of her own.

Even after establishing a judgement-free space, Small was still hesitant to share too much, but it didn’t deter Mullen from offering her phone number to the young mom of three — just in case.