THE MINISTRY of Women and Child Development will soon issue a notification to facilitate inter-country adoption under the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act (HAMA). According to the new regulation, families adopting under this Act can receive a no-objection certificate from Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), the government’s adoption authority, to take the child abroad.

Currently, families have to approach the courts for the no-objection certificates.

Last month, the ministry issued a notification waiving the two-year mandatory period that an adoptive family would have to stay in the country for constant monitoring by CARA and other authorities. According to this new rule, adoptive families can now intimate Indian diplomatic missions two weeks in advance of their intent to travel with the adopted child. The families are to furnish all details, including that of residence. The Indian missions will then monitor the progress and security of the adopted child, instead of CARA and other authorities.

Ministry officials on Tuesday said these measures were being taken to facilitate ease in carrying out adoptions, while at the same time ensure prevention of abuse or child trafficking.

Enacted in 1956, the HAMA is a personal law applicable to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains and largely pertains to adoptions within a family. Adoptions under it are simpler as the two parties along with the child only need to approach a court. On the other hand, CARA has strict stipulations prior to and after adoptions, such as Home Study Reports of the prospective parents which are prepared through social workers of selected Specialised Adoption Agency.

The public outcry about the adoption break, which has since been discontinued, diverts attention from what the discussion should really be about. So says Sophie Withaeckx, who was part of the expert panel on intercountry adoption for two years. "The experience of adoptees who have been victims of systematic malpractice is real."

BI was part of the expert panel on intercountry adoption for almost two years. In this I contributed to a thorough reflection on the question of whether and how it is possible to prevent malpractice in intercountry adoption. The final report was drawn up on the basis of intensive research from various scientific disciplines.

The report includes 20 recommendations. On the one hand, they are aimed at a thorough reform of the adoption landscape, and on the other hand, they aim to do justice to adoptees who have become victims of malpractice. The latter can be done, among other things, by expanding aftercare, providing remedial measures and offering public apologies to victims.

The adoption break is necessary for a thoroughly reformed adoption practice that must be free from malpractice.

After the report was published, there was immediate outrage. Unfortunately not because intercountry adoption can still be accompanied by malpractice, but because of the recommendation to take an adoption break pending the reform of the system. That pause is, however, necessary for a thoroughly reformed adoption practice that must be free from malpractice.

Sit for any time in the foyer of the Hilton Hotel in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, and you'll see a procession of Americans and Europeans wandering from their rooms across the marble floor to the restaurant or swimming pool with their precious new possessions - babies or infants they've just adopted.

I'd never really thought a great deal about international adoption until I was confronted with the scene as I checked into the hotel in September last year.

I'd arrived to film a story for ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent program about the drought-induced famine.

The longer I stayed, the more I started to think about the adopted children - where they were from and how they must feel to suddenly find themselves alone with someone whose skin colour doesn't match theirs and whose language they don't speak.

They're dressed in alien attire - a brand new Red Sox baseball cap and T-shirt with some cute and cheery foreign slogan plastered across the front - and in an environment like none they've ever seen, when just out on the street is the one they know so well, where their extended family and fellow countrymen reside.

NEW DELHI: In a bid to ease inter-country adoptions, the Central Adoption Resource Authority has framed regulations under

the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act on the direction of the Union government, an official said on Tuesday.

Till now, there were no regulations for the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) for inter-country adoptions under the

Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act (HAMA), which covers Hindu, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains.

"So, when a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) or Overseas-Citizen of India used to get adoption done under the HAMA, they faced a

NEW DELHI: The priority for adoption may be given to those who are from the same state as that of the child so that the social and cultural milieu is preserved, a senior official said.

At present, people get a choice of three states from where they wish to adopt.

NEW DELHI: The priority for adoption may be given to those who are from the same state as that of the child so that the social and cultural milieu is preserved, a senior official said.

At present, people get a choice of three states from where they wish to adopt.

Children failed by the institutions of care are subjected to a system that sets them up for failure

Santosh was only 14 years old when 3 policemen barged into his house in Delhi's north district. The chaos, the screaming, the image of his elder brother Ravi (17) being dragged by the collar escaped his comprehension. All he felt was fear, as he hid behind his mother who was begging the police to let go of her son.

While two policemen dragged Ravi out of the house, one stayed behind. Few minutes later, a voice called out - "woh doosre ko bhi le aa" (bring the other one also). His mother could not protect Santosh; he followed his brother's fate. In that moment, he ceased to be a "child'; he became a "juvenile" - a "child in conflict with law".

Santosh and Ravi were taken to a police station where they were kept for two days. In those 48 hours, two children, caught in the net of India's criminal legal system for an alleged crime, were ripped off the virtues of their childhood. They were physically and psychologically assaulted, their lives altered, their conscience scarred, for reasons they never understood.

The Quint interviewed many children like Santosh and Ravi in an attempt to document the pains of navigating our criminal justice system as "children in conflict with law". We also interviewed lawyers who represent such children before juvenile courts, as well as child rights activists. We also visited juvenile homes in Delhi to grasp the perils of institutional response to juvenile delinquency.

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – A man who lost custody of his newborn son, only to have an appellate court reverse termination of his parental rights, is suing Catholic Charities West Michigan for placing the child with an adoptive family.

The child was put up for adoption shortly after birth three years ago.

The lawsuit alleges Catholic Charities committed fraud and failed to look for the biological father, Peter Kruithoff. In separate proceedings, a Kalamazoo County judge terminated his parental rights while an Ottawa County judge awarded him custody.

“The conduct of Defendants was extreme and outrageous and beyond the bounds of what is acceptable in civilized society,” attorneys John Moritz and Michael Villar wrote in the lawsuit.

They had originally filed the lawsuit in Ottawa County Circuit Court but Catholic Charities asked that it be moved to federal court.

Nearly three hundred Korean adoptees abroad, including eleven from Belgium, are going to court in Seoul. They are suing that their adoption was fraudulently committed.

Sixteen years ago, Yung Fierens (46) met her first parents, two sisters and a brother, while visiting South Korea. 'I knocked on the door of the adoption service and was shown my original file,' she says. 'It contained all the information about my origin. Surprising, because my adoption file in Belgium didn't contain them.'

Later, when she requested a copy, Fierens was lied to that the original file did not exist. 'I was one of the first to search. Last month I was in Seoul again, this time with a friend who wants to find her first mother. We're sure the Korean government kept that record, it did in almost all cases. But she doesn't want to release them anymore. She let almost all the children leave under the guise of being orphaned or abandoned.'

'Accidentally discovered that there are also images of our suffering'

Nearly 300 Korean adoptees from around the world yesterday filed a complaint with the Seoul Reconciliation and Truth Commission over past fraudulent adoption practices. Among them also Fierens and ten other Belgians. The initiative comes from Danish fellow sufferers.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, more than twenty thousand Chilean children were adopted and taken abroad by French, Italian, American, Belgian and even Canadian families. Adoption encouraged by the dictatorship of General Pinochet. But years later, voices began to be raised in Chile: several thousand biological mothers had in fact never agreed to have their babies given up for adoption. RFI went to meet these women in Chile, but also children adopted in France, who are looking for their origins.

From our correspondent in Chile,

1,200 kilometers south of Santiago, on the island of Chiloé, Ruth Huisca puts wood in the stove which warms the main room, in the middle of the southern winter. This domestic worker, aged around fifty, welcomes us in a red house with the typical architecture of the island, with its facade covered in wooden shingles.

In the mid-1980s, Ruth lived and worked in Osorno, in the south of the country. She became pregnant by her boyfriend when she was 17, and he was 16. He moved to another town, and Ruth gave birth to a baby girl alone at the Osorno hospital. But she doesn't dare return to her home in the countryside. “  At the time, I couldn't have come back to my grandparents with a baby. They would have thrown me out, they would have given me a beating. So I was afraid to tell them I was pregnant. And I looked for a pension for my daughter, I entrusted her to a lady I trusted.  »

Hyderabad: A 68-year-old French woman who went missing three days

ago was found murdered in bushes at Himayatsagar on Saturday. Later in

the day, police arrested three persons, including the victim’s adopted

daughter, in the murder case.

On Thursday, Cyberabad police received a complaint that Marie Christine,