In this SAP blog highlighting the relationship between the government and the foundation Flash, who was involved since 1979 with the adoption of children from countries such as Sri Lanka. Flash will be discontinued in 2010. The foundation has mediated for a total of 2,410 children, most of whom come from Sri Lanka.

How did it work? When adoptive parents from the Netherlands had a permit in principle from the Ministry of Justice, Flash contacted a few permanent private mediators in Sri Lanka. In practice, the Dutch parents stayed in Sri Lanka for about 3 weeks, with a travel visa applied for and granted by the Dutch embassy on the last day of the child's stay. Flash advised a week after arrival in the Netherlands to report to the local aliens police in order to apply for a residence permit. Because no details of the child had to be provided in advance, foster parents were usually not aware of who the child is and who the biological parents were. On March 2, 1983, the Ministry of Justice wrote to Flash that from now on the name in writing to the Ministry of Justice, date of birth, nationality and gender of the foster child are stated. The practice of granting a travel visa to adopted children was formally 'not entirely correct'. As a result, an authorization for temporary residence must be issued from now on. A condition for this is that the parent (s) and / or the legal representatives of the baby have renounced the baby in a locally applicable manner and acceptable according to Dutch standards. The personal details of the child to be adopted must be known to the Ministry of Justice before the parents go abroad. A condition for this is that the parent (s) and / or the legal representatives of the baby have renounced the baby in a locally applicable and acceptable manner according to Dutch standards. The personal details of the child to be adopted must be known to the Ministry of Justice before the parents go abroad. A condition for this is that the parent (s) and / or the legal representatives of the baby have renounced the baby in a locally applicable and acceptable manner according to Dutch standards. The personal details of the child to be adopted must be known to the Ministry of Justice before the parents go abroad.

Flash reports on July 11, 1983 that this would mean that the foster parents would have to stay longer in Sri Lanka and that she does not agree. Apparently the interests of the buyers were greater than those of the child. Rather than halting adoption, the government is allowing Flash to continue to handle current affairs in the usual manner. As a result, it remains unknown where exactly the baby comes from. The Ministry of Justice announced on September 28, 1983 that it does not wish to process requests from foreign nationals whose full personal details are not yet known. Flash is now given another postponement, until January 1, 1984, to announce the child's personal details in advance. In the letter of June 5, 1984 from the Ministry of Justice, it is noted that Flash is still making requests without the required statement.

On July 26, 1984, representatives of Flash reported on their working visit to Sri Lanka, where they discussed the problem of applying for temporary residence by name. It is agreed that prospective foster parents may travel to Sri Lanka as soon as a child becomes available. As soon as the details of the child are known, they will be forwarded to Flash and the application for the authorization for temporary stay will be applied for. This, too, is contrary to the required advance notice of these essential data. The government has consciously let Flash run its course. Given the coverage of adoption practices worldwide and in Sri Lanka in particular, and Flash's reputation, this is particularly careless. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of babies have been taken from Sri Lanka, without knowing who their family was and is. The government had the power to allow adoptions only if it was established who the baby belonged to, that the parent (s) in Sri Lanka gave permission to give it up, and that everything was recorded so that the baby could later interact with his or her family in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, many children were found to have been robbed from hospitals, born in baby farms, and there was widespread fraud with passports by rogue traders.

In the next blog, attention will be paid to regulations when it comes to adoption.

Mister President,

Dear Colleagues,

I have an unpleasant mission to bring to your attention the fact that, after 1989, under the auspices of the governments that came to power, numerous pedophilia scandals broke out in the territory of our country, in which foreign citizens were involved. The Treptow case is, therefore, only the tip of the iceberg.

1) In 1999, the Turkish citizen Erugrui Vahit, driver of a TIR truck in transit through Romania, lured 3 children from the street in Zal?u, aged between 10 and 15, which he subjected to sexual perversions (oral and anal ) in the TIR cab. As a reward, he offered them 10 German marks and 5,000 lei. The Turk was caught having sex with one of the victims, the child declaring that, out of pain, he tried to press the horn of the car, but the Turkish pedophile hit him in the head.

2) In 1996, the French citizen Michel Paul Albenque (49 years old), was sentenced by the Bucharest Tribunal to 5 years in prison for maintaining pedophile relationships, of homosexual type, with several boys, street children. The court decided that the pedophile should be expelled from Romania after the execution of the sentence. As Albenque is also the perpetrator of crimes against sexual life, committed in his country of origin, in 1999, the French court requested the extradition of the pedophile, but he expressed his desire to remain in Romanian prisons, where conditions are much better. . Secondly, the French Criminal Code provides for a higher punishment for crimes committed by Albenque than in Romania, up to 15 years in prison. Michel Albenque was the head of an international network of pedophiles, consisting of dozens of people arrested in 2002 for rape and sexual harassment. Police found records at Albenque's home revealing the organization of the recruitment of children since 1989, as well as the network of dozens of people searching for their victims on the outskirts of major cities in France, Romania and Germany. Following a search of Albenque's garage, notebooks with complete lists were found, including the names of hundreds of children, many of them recruited from Romania. Tempted by the ease with which they could practice their vice in our country, some foreign pedophiles moved completely to Romania, under the pretext of carrying out commercial activities, benefiting from the advantages offered by the Romanian state to foreign investors! Police found records at Albenque's home revealing the organization of the recruitment of children since 1989, as well as the network of dozens of people searching for their victims on the outskirts of major cities in France, Romania and Germany. Following a search of Albenque's garage, notebooks with complete lists were found, including the names of hundreds of children, many of whom were recruited from Romania. Tempted by the ease with which they could practice their vice in our country, some foreign pedophiles moved completely to Romania, under the pretext of carrying out commercial activities, benefiting from the advantages offered by the Romanian state to foreign investors! Police found records at Albenque's home revealing the organization of the recruitment of children since 1989, as well as the network of dozens of people searching for their victims on the outskirts of major cities in France, Romania and Germany. Following a search of Albenque's garage, notebooks with complete lists were found, including the names of hundreds of children, many of whom were recruited from Romania. Tempted by the ease with which they could practice their vice in our country, some foreign pedophiles moved completely to Romania, under the pretext of carrying out commercial activities, benefiting from the advantages offered by the Romanian state to foreign investors! as well as the network of dozens of people looking for their victims on the outskirts of major cities in France, Romania and Germany. Following a search of Albenque's garage, notebooks with complete lists were found, including the names of hundreds of children, many of them recruited from Romania. Tempted by the ease with which they could practice their vice in our country, some foreign pedophiles moved completely to Romania, under the pretext of carrying out commercial activities, benefiting from the advantages offered by the Romanian state to foreign investors! as well as the network of dozens of people looking for their victims on the outskirts of major cities in France, Romania and Germany. Following a search of Albenque's garage, notebooks with complete lists were found, including the names of hundreds of children, many of them recruited from Romania. Tempted by the ease with which they could practice their vice in our country, some foreign pedophiles moved completely to Romania, under the pretext of carrying out commercial activities, benefiting from the advantages offered by the Romanian state to foreign investors!

More than 5,000 unidentified children were buried in about 100 mass graves in two cemeteries, said to be of the poor and children, in Pipera and Frumu?ani. It all happened between 1997 and 2000. On most of the crosses, now we, from Berton, do not write anything. It looks like a ghost cemetery. But he hides the pain of a mother whose child was lost in one of these common pits, and now she can't find it. The woman filed a complaint against those who brought her child here and received a criminal fine for keeping silent…

On 21.08.2014 at the headquarters of the Inspector General of Police was filed a complaint registered at number 158778. Through this document, Angela Tudorache, nurse at a hospital in Bucharest, asked the bodies authorized to search for the body of her child, who died in 1997 in The Municipal Hospital and buried, with "documents that can no longer be found", in one of the common graves in the children's cemetery in Pipera. The woman's story is hallucinatory and terrifying at the same time.

"I gave birth to Gabriel, my first child, in 1997 and they came two days later to tell me that he had died. I went crazy with pain. Then they put a document in front of me in which I handed over the child's body, to be buried by I don't know who. They said that, not being baptized, he needed a special job, which they would take care of. I signed, but I tell you I didn't know what I was signing at the time. Then I asked to be shown my child, and they took me to the morgue. Gabriel was in a refrigerator, cut in half, without organs. An autopsy had been performed. I asked him to let me take him and take care of him, to be sewn, dressed and put in a coffin. They did not leave me, they reminded me that I signed the paper and that it will be buried, they said then, by the Patriarchate "

SECRETS OF GOVERNORS. The ghost cemetery on the outskirts of Bucharest: 5,000 children buried in mass graves in Pipera

"I've been judging them for almost 10 years"

The Joy Sowers, a Belgium-based group started by Franciscans, has helped with 2,500 Indian orphan adoptions and sponsored 4,000 students during the past 20 years.

Joy Sowers head Franciscan Father Joseph Nouters, who visited the eastern Indian city of Calcutta in mid-August, said coming to India is hard for him because "there is such a wide gap between the rich and the poor."

Father Nouters, 61, told UCA News he regretted that their projects had "little impact on the problem."

Father Nouters, who took over as Joy Sowers head in 1983, said the worst poverty he has seen in India is in Calcutta.

"Nowhere in India is there such abject poverty as in Calcutta," he said. "We will help but our efforts seem so little to change the situation."

Mr Nigel Cantwell, Ms Gill Haworth and Ms Naomi Angell

Q220 Chairman: Is there, or could there be, a set of criteria which would find general agreement? In a way you are both saying these are the sorts of things which would make us worry about the country. Is there a set of criteria? Could there be a set of criteria which would lead you to conclude that a particular country was not one in which adoption should be considered outside special cases?

Ms Angell: I think they would have to be reasonably general, because it is a huge range of concerns that have been raised. I would add to that I feel there should be a dialogue with countries where there is concern about their procedures. If there is a failure to respond in a reasonable way to those concerns over a period of time, that would cause concern. Different countries raise very different issues. As an illustration of that, for instance, in Guatemala the concern was on the provenance of relinquished children, that the people giving the children up for adoption may not be the mothers but were saying that they were, and what was put in place there was DNA testing by the British Embassy to provide those sorts of safeguards. In Cambodia children are not relinquished on the whole; it is mainly that they are abandoned, and it is very difficult then. DNA testing would not work, so one is having to look at very different solutions. I think any criteria would have to be broad and general.

Q221 Ann Coffey: Just to explore that a little bit more, if there could be a general agreement about what you might identify as being systemic abuse over a period of time, how would that information come into countries like the UK? Would UNICEF have a role in that?

Mr Cantwell: My feeling is that there is now a wide potential range of credible sources, in respect of possible abuse of systems. Obviously there are organisations such as UNICEF, such as Save the Children, etcetera, who have done or sponsored reports in different countries, and I would say quite often courageous reports, or on problems relating to inter country adoption, but let me come back to my very first example. I actually quite strongly believe that the authorities of the countries concerned—obviously not in all cases, but in many, many cases—are themselves the source of expressed concerns that could be picked up by countries such as the UK or any other receiving country. That is certainly the case in Cambodia where on several occasions the Authorities there have stated very clearly, "We are not in a position to deal with this, we cannot cope ", and yet the situation rolled on. There are local NGOs too: for example, in the case of Cambodia, there is a league for human rights which has done tremendous work on this. Then you have the consultation process that exists within the framework of the Hague Convention, for example, the special commissions. We had one such meeting in 2000, a large part of which was devoted to the case of Guatemala, there is the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the special rapporteurs, within the UN system itself. There is a whole range of sources of information, I think.

It was just a few years after the Liberation War in 1971. Caroline Amena Lauritsen was a child then. She does not remember how old she was back then, but her adoption papers say she was three years old.

With a group of children, all from the same “baby home” as hers, Caroline flew to Denmark on November 13, 1975. The only memories she has from her life back in Bangladesh are a few words—words that she finds hard to pronounce now.

“Amena no ghum” and “paani” are the only words that she remembers, she tells me, as we settle down for a chat in a cosy apartment in Dhaka and I ask her what she remembers of her life in Bangladesh, decades back. She also has one lasting memory of her best friend “Moti”.

“The first thing I named when I arrived at my parent's house in Denmark was their cat. I called it Pilai.”

Caroline Amena Lauritsen is now a woman in her late forties and is visiting Bangladesh in search of her lost family.

Adoptions can be long and frustrating affairs with prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) having to navigate bureaucratic rules,

paperwork and legal availability of children but the Covid-19 lockdown is really testing their patience. After a threeyear wait,

Sandeep Kishore and Vidya Venkataramanan, academics based in Chicago, were finally set to bring home a one-and-a-halfyearold child from Maharashtra. All their paperwork was done, and the child’s passport was ready. But then, the world shut

down. And the couple couldn’t fly in to take custody of the boy.

Vidya says that a baby shower that her office organised for her had to be cancelled. Clothes bought for him have been sitting

IS five-year-old Sandhya the Kulkarnis' daughter or ward? This question came up when on December 3, a division bench of the Mumbai high court ruled that Sandhya could only be the Pune-based couple's ward since they already have two biological children and an adopted daughter. Sandhya's 'guardians', dismayed by the judgement, intend to take matters to the Supreme Court. Bolstering their resolve is the National Association of Adoptive Families (NAAF) which may file a special leave petition.

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Mr. Pieter Woltjo Bult was appointed as the UNICEF Representative for Romania in July 2017 at a time when UNICEF and Romania were developing their new partnership for children for 2018-2022. The objective of this partnership is to support the progressive realization of child rights and the reduction of equity gaps affecting children and their families in Romania and beyond by developing quality, universal, community-based, child and family-centered services and transforming social norms related to discrimination and violence against children. Furthermore, UNICEF and the Government of Romania are committed to identifying and sharing best practices in advancing children’s rights at the regional and global level.

Mr. Bult has been working for children as an international civil servant for more than 20 years. He has extensive experience around the world, working in humanitarian contexts as well as at UNICEF Headquarters.

Between 2011 and 2017, he served as the UNICEF Senior Advisor for the Public Partnership Division at the New York Headquarters where he led a team dealing with Europe and Central Asia on collaboration with governments including some of UNICEF’s biggest donors. Previously, he worked as Deputy Country Director of Programmes for UNDP in India, supporting the design and management of the UNDP - Government of India Country Programme, focusing on poverty reduction, social protection and climate change. Between 2006 and 2007, Pieter headed the UN Tsunami Recovery Programme in India, in charge of coordinating and directing seven UN agencies in response to the Tsunami in India. Earlier, he was the UNICEF Learning Officer for the Organizational Learning and Development section in the Division of Human Resources based at New York Headquarters.

Between 1996 and 2001, Mr. Bult developed programming and managed emergency response to the food crisis in Indonesia and child protection and education crisis in the State of Palestine. He started his career as UNICEF Assistant Programme Officer in Suriname where he designed and managed the first UNICEF Country Programme in the country.

Mr. Bult has a Master’s degree in Human Geography of Developing Countries from the Catholic University of Nijmegen and a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from the School for Higher Professional Education, Netherlands.

Domestic adoptees are concerned about the ongoing adoption and distance research. The Verwey-Jonker Institute emphasizes that the researchers work strictly independently.

Petra VissersApril 24, 2020 , 6:27 PM

Some of the domestic, now adult, adoptees are concerned about the ongoing investigation into domestic distance and adoption. They doubt whether the investigation is independent and want the reporting point to remain open longer because of the corona crisis. Six of them have sent a long letter of concern to the Lower House. D66 Member of Parliament Vera Bergkamp puts parliamentary questions to responsible minister Sander Dekker (VVD, legal protection).

The research into distance and adoption should provide more clarity about the period between 1956 and 1984, when thousands of women gave up their children under pressure, and the role of the government in this.

The domestic adoptees want to know, among other things, what will happen with their statements and data after they have called the registration point and who has access to it, says Eugénie Smits van Waesberghe on behalf of the group of adoptees. “For example, have statements also been sent to the ministry? Because we don't want that. And who decides which reports are forwarded to the researchers of the Verwey-Jonker Institute? ” According to her, there are also errors in the interview reports that people have requested from the registration point.