Partners

. INTRAS Foundation

http://www.intras.es

ARSIS - Thessaloniki

http://arsis.gr/en/home/

Useful links

Adoptees' organizations

Adopted People United

Organization in Limburg for adoptees

Adoptiepedia

Racine

Over the past 20 years a significant number of intercountry adoptions have taken place from abroad to France. The adoptees of the early 2000s are now major or in the process of becoming so. Also, more and more of them feel the legitimate need to search for their origins. Because this research is a complex and not without risk, being able to support them is today the great challenge to be taken up for the central authorities and all the actors of the adoption.

In order to offer comprehensive, free and quality support to adoptees wishing to reconnect with their origins, the ISS France launched on September 29, 2021, during a webinar, the RACINE project (Search for origins, Support, Cooperation, Identification of partners, Narration, Listening).

Supported financially by the International Adoption Mission of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (Central Authority responsible for intercountry adoption) in its pilot phase, this project will focus on three countries chosen due to the large number of 'adoptions that have been carried out there and / or the large number of requests currently received by the French central authority:

Ethiopia (4,303 adoptions to France between 2001 and 2020)

A day after news of the illegal 'sale of Covid-19 orphans' surfaced in Kashmir valley, Police along with the Civil Administration Thursday sealed an office of an NGO in Pampore in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district for allegedly being involved in the sale of COVID orphans.

According to reports, Global Welfare Charitable Trust in Samboora Pampore was sealed after a team of police and Tehsil administration raided the office and seized some important documents.

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On Wednesday 24 November, the court ruled on two cases concerning intercountry adoption. A woman adopted from Bangladesh and a man illegally adopted from Brazil have both filed lawsuits over their adoption. The court in The Hague rejected the woman's claims on the basis of prescription and a substantive assessment. In the case of illegal adoption from Brazil, the court partially allowed the claims. According to Defense for Children, both cases show how complicated it is for intercountry adoptees to recover parentage information, restore identity and seek justice when fundamental rights have been violated.

Case 1: adoption from Bangladesh

In 1976, the then four-year-old woman and her brother were adopted from Bangladesh in the Netherlands. Following an episode of Nieuwsuur in November 2017, the woman realized that her biological mother did not abandon her children, but gave them up under false pretenses and then searched for them for years.

The woman has filed a lawsuit against Terre des Hommes (whose country director at the time had a double function and was also a representative of an adoption organization), adoption organization Wereldkinderen (then BIA) and the State. Its position is that the accused parties contributed to the adoption that allegedly took place under false pretenses. According to the woman, the accused parties also failed to properly investigate abuses in intercountry adoptions from Bangladesh and to inform those involved about this.

Terre des Hommes and Wereldkinderen invoked the fact that the woman was adopted more than twenty years ago and that her claims are therefore time-barred. The court ruled in favor of the organizations in this regard. The court also states that Terre des Hommes was not involved in this adoption at the time. The State initially also invoked statute of limitations, but withdrew it following a report that the Commission Investigating Intercountry Adoption (COIA) issued in February 2021 about abuses in intercountry adoptions and the role that the government plays in this. After substantive treatment, the court considers the woman's claim that her adoption in 1976 from Bangladesh was unlawfully established.

Opposition members in Lok Sabha Wednesday attacked the government for excluding live-in couples, single men and the LGBTQ community from the ambit of the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill, 2021, attacking the legislation as “discriminatory” and “patriarchal”.

Congress member Karti P Chidambaram, who opened the debate on the Bill, said: “This law is not a Hindu law, it is actually a Victorian law.”

He invoked the Mahabharata and the Puranas several times, saying: “Our epics have so many instances of unconventional births.”

“This law has not come from the Hindu liberal traditions. This law has come from the completely regressive, Victorian, and colonial mindset. I will tell you why. This law excludes many people, rather than it includes. When I have given you so many instances of unconventional births and unconventional unions in our Hindu epics, this law only allows married people to have access to this technology. It does not allow LGBTQ people to have access to this technology. It does not allow single men to have access to this technology,” Karti Chidambaram said adding that the bill is “discriminatory”.

Karti said: “This law does not take into account the new realities of India. Of course, these new realities are not new realities. These were there in our ancient scriptures. Those unions which were always there, were suppressed by the colonial mentality. These unions must also be given access to this technology. The LGBTQ population, live-in couples, and single men must also have access to this technology if they want so.”

Maeve’s law will legalise partial DNA donations, allowing women to give birth without passing on a genetic disease

Members of parliament have voted to legalise controversial mitochondrial donation in the first conscience vote since same-sex marriage in 2017.

The legislation, known as Maeve’s law, will legalise partial DNA donations, allowing women to give birth without passing on a genetic disease.

The bill amended the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction Act 2002 (Cth), and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002 (Cth), and was subject to a conscience vote.

It passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday night, 92 votes to 29.

Thiruvananthapuram: Even as the state government has claimed that it

was standing beside Anupama S Chandran in her fight to get her missing

child back, the CPM has dragged itself into a fresh controversy.

At least two leaders of the party, including minister Saji Cherian, have

made controversial statements against Anupama and her partner Ajith

Shown Here:

Agreed to Senate (11/30/2021)

117th CONGRESS

1st Session

S. RES. 464

It was a warm September morning and the house of an employee of the Northern Power Distribution Company of Telangana Ltd was decked up for a small yet intimate religious ceremony in the small village. It was a joyous occasion for the man, in his forties, and his wife. A long wait for the couple to adopt a child had finally come true—this was to be the ‘homecoming’ of a 10-year-old boy the couple had ‘adopted’ a few days earlier from a care home in Mumbai. But the story didn’t have a happy ending. A police team swooped on the house that day and arrested the man on charges of kidnapping—the boy he had adopted was found to have been kidnapped from Mumbai earlier. The man landed in jail, though he claims he was the victim of an elaborate racket.

Last year, a man in Mumbai found out that his three children—put in a childcare home run by a well-known charity after the death of their mother—have been adopted by an American couple without his knowledge. He has been fighting a legal battle since then. His case may be not exactly of fraud as the charity had put out newspaper notices about the plan to put up the three children for adoption. But for many others, it has been a nightmarish experience after being taken for a ride by organised gangs.

Experts and activists say the main reason for adoption frauds are India’s complicated laws and their cumbersome implementation process due to which couples desperate to adopt children often look for unauthorised channels. India tightened its adoption rules after cases emerged of parents being coerced or tricked to give up their children for inter-country adoptions. And the involvement of doctors, nurses and orphanage officials in a racket that runs into crores of rupees annually makes it all the more difficult for unsuspecting couples in ­detecting fraudulent deals. Sometimes, of course, couples go ahead despite being aware of the illegal nature of the adoption process.

Ashok Chand, a former deputy commissioner of police (crime) who had unearthed at least three adoption rackets in Delhi around 2010, says that racketeers have more or less the same modus operandi in which they either buy ­children from poor parents or ask them to ­conceive and hand over the newborn to needy parents in return for money.

“One gang had four members, including two women, a doctor and another man. The women were operating the racket in the garb of ­running NGOs,” Chand says.