How adoptees face hostility and human rights violations in Nepal’s citizenship system

A growing number of adult adoptees of Nepali origin have started returning to the land of their birth, and seeking not only emotional reconnection but formal recognition through the Non-resident Nepali (NRN) card or citizenship. 

But these returnees are too often met not with welcome, but with suspicion, obstruction, and at times, open hostility. 

After becoming the first adoptee to obtain an NRN card, I recently returned to Nepal to successfully claim NRN-citizenship. That success does not signify a welcoming state structure towards adoptees. On the contrary, it was an odyssey through psychological, legal and transnational hurdles.

A 51-year-old woman from the Enz district has been sentenced to prison for defamation of Pforzheim Member of the Bundestag Gunther Krichbaum and his wife Dr. Oana Krichbaum. By decision of November 15, 2023, the 1st Criminal Senate of the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court dismissed as unfounded the defendant's appeal against a judgment of the Pforzheim Criminal Division of the Karlsruhe Regional Court dated March 8, 2023. This judgment sentenced the defendant to a total of seven months' imprisonment, one month of which is considered served due to procedural delays contrary to the rule of law.

According to the findings of the Regional Court, the defendant had alleged in numerous Facebook posts and in emails to various recipients, including newspaper editorial staff and members of state and federal parliaments, that Dr. Oana Krichbaum had been involved in illegal child trafficking in Romania and that Gunther Krichbaum had attempted to cover this up by exploiting his political office. After initially pursuing civil action against the defendant, the Krichbaum couple filed a criminal complaint on April 23, 2018, regarding three Facebook posts published by the defendant on February 13, February 26, and March 26, 2018, all of which referred to Dr. Oana Krichbaum and, in two cases, to Gunter Krichbaum. The defendant continued to make similar defamatory allegations, even in her final statement at the appeal hearing before the Regional Court. In its judgment, the Regional Court also found that the defendants’ allegations were neither demonstrably true nor covered by freedom of expression or other legitimate interests of the defendants.

The Karlsruhe Regional Court sentenced the defendant to six months' imprisonment each for the three offenses mentioned in 2018, which are the sole subject of these proceedings, and combined these individual sentences into a total prison sentence of seven months. The Regional Court declared one month of this sentence to have already been served due to a procedural delay that occurred during the appeal proceedings, which violated the rule of law. The Regional Court did not suspend the execution of the total prison sentence because it did not consider the defendant to have a positive criminal prognosis, as neither the civil proceedings nor the previous criminal proceedings had deterred her from continuing to make defamatory allegations about the Krichbaum couple.

In the appeal proceedings, the First Criminal Senate of the Higher Regional Court had to examine both the content of the Regional Court's written reasons for the judgment and – to the extent challenged by the defendants' defense – the proceedings before the Regional Court for legal errors that may have affected the decision. However, the Senate did not identify any such legal errors on which the Regional Court's judgment was based. In particular, it did not consider the offenses to be time-barred and did not object to the defense's rejection of applications for auxiliary evidence. The fact that a witness's email was read out at the main hearing instead of her being questioned clearly had no effect on the content of the Regional Court's judgment. The Regional Court correctly considered the defendants' fundamental right to freedom of expression. The Regional Court's sentencing – including the failure to grant a suspended sentence – is also not objectionable under the law of appeal.

No further appeal is available. The Karlsruhe Regional Court's ruling is now final.

The shock news arrived without warning in January: Michela Leidi was being officially cancelled as the mother of her daughter on the infant's birth certificate.

'I cried for ten days when I opened the letter,' said Michela, 38, who lives on the outskirts of Bergamo, a city in northern Italy, near the Swiss border. 'It was as if I did not exist.'

Michela and her 35-year-old wife Viola are among the first targets of the Right-wing Italian government's attempt to crack down on same-sex parenting and surrogacy, imposing its 'conservative moral values' in the country.

A mother has revealed how she has married her adopted son - after raising him from the age of 14. 

Aisylu Chizhevskaya Mingalim, 53, from Tatarstan, Russia, has left child welfare experts horrified by tying the knot with 22-year-old  Daniel Chizhevsky.

She first met Daniel when he was just 13 and working as a singing teacher at his orphanage.

GREENVILLE, S.C. (FOX Carolina) - A former Food Network contestant who was convicted of killing her foster daughter will not get a new trial, according to the South Carolina Court of Appeals.

Ariel Robinson was found guilty of homicide by child abuse in the death of 3-year-old Victoria “Tori” Rose Smith.

Victoria Rose Smith

Tori was beaten severely with a belt, causing her to suffer internal bleeding. She died at Robinson’s home on Sellwood Circle in Simpsonville in January 2021.

The first parents of Trui's adopted daughter were left in the dark for 14 years: 'Terrible!'

Trui Vandewalle has no regrets, but would not choose international adoption again.

Trui Vandewalle has no regrets, but would not choose international adoption again. — © Fred Debrock

Sweater Vandewalle is the adoptive mother of a daughter from Ethiopia. She did not wait for the Flemish government, but went in search of her daughter's roots herself. 'They made her believe that she was completely alone. That is completely untrue.'

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Adoptionstrekanten | David Kildendal Nielsen posted 19 December 2023

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Surrogacy is prohibited in Germany. Nevertheless, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main allowed a German couple to adopt a stepchild born abroad to a surrogate mother.

The Higher Regional Court (OLG) of Frankfurt am Main has ruled that the stepchild adoption of a child born abroad to a surrogate mother is possible despite the ban on surrogacy in Germany (decision of December 14, 2023, case number 2 UF 33/23). With this ruling, a German couple can proceed with the corresponding stepchild adoption.

The background to the case was the German couple's previously unfulfilled desire to have children. They had contacted a Ukrainian fertility clinic to arrange a surrogacy. With the help of an egg donation, a pregnancy was subsequently induced in a Ukrainian woman.

At the beginning of 2020, the husband had already acknowledged paternity of the child born to the surrogate mother in Ukraine. In the summer of 2020, the German couple took in the child, and now the wife wanted to adopt the child to legally secure her position.

Growing up without worries. That is what this year's De Warmste Week is all about. A theme that is close to Hinda Bluekens (35)'s heart. She spent the first years of her life in an institution. Together with Danira Boukhriss Terkessidis (33) she looks back on that missed start in a two-part documentary.

“I really don’t find it easy to share this,” says Hinda Bluekens halfway through the first episode of Start gemist . She is sitting at the table with Danira Boukhriss Terkessidis and leafing through a thick folder containing photos and reports that document the first four years of her life. A period that she was forced to spend in a ckg, a centre for childcare and family support as it is called in full. “Even the fact that you are even touching that folder, I find intense,” she confesses to Danira.

“Sharing the contents of that folder with an outsider affected me much more than I had anticipated,” she says a few months after that fateful day of shooting. “The whole story that is described in it is not new to me. I have carried it with me for more than thirty years. But when you show that folder to someone who does not know that past and who asks questions that you have never thought about, you start to look at everything in it in a different way. Photos that you have seen a hundred times suddenly take on a different meaning. That released quite a few emotions.”

These unexpected emotions did not cause any doubt about the plan to share her past not only with Danira but also with the television viewers of Flanders. Hinda, who is known on Instagram as Hinda House, has worked as a journalist, columnist and video reporter for Flair , De Standaard and Gazet van Antwerpen in recent years and has written for the VTM GO series Only Friends in the past year , had been thinking about doing something about that past for some time. “I just didn't really know what that 'something' should be. Did I want to write about it? Should it be a television project? Or maybe a podcast?”

The entrance to the Shri Shraddhanand Anathalaya Ashram orphanage in Nagpur, as seen in 1996 (left, photographed by my mum) and 2012, when she, my sister and I recently visited (right, photographed by me).

“So, you want to get her married?”

The air outside the orphanage hung still, hot and dry around the yellow cement buildings. It was the kind of heat that makes your skin sizzle and ache for a cloud burst, or perhaps any clouds at all. 106°.