February 2021 was an awful month for intercountry adoptions. First, the Netherlands suspended them, then social development declared that children are better off in institutional care in South Africa than in family care outside the country. Without evidence, both decisions have been deemed in children’s best interests. But, has anyone asked the children?

It’s been almost two months since the Netherlands’ shock decision to halt all intercountry adoptions. The unilateral decision by then Minister of Legal Protection Sander Dekker, in response to the Joustra Committee’s report on the issue, is temporary and will not affect adoptions currently in process.

But experts warn that in an election year it may be months before a new government is able to re-evaluate the ban, and that because intercountry adoptions are so lengthy, delaying the screening of new adoptive parents may result in children spending much longer in institutional care.

The committee uncovered massive adoption abuse between 1967 and 1998 in five sending countries – Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – including corruption, falsified documents, officials forcing birth parents to give up their children in return for payment or through coercion, child trafficking, baby farming and obscuring children’s identities.

It also drew the startling conclusion that the Dutch government and Dutch intermediaries were aware of and involved in the abuses, that the government did not effectively tackle them and that the abuses (unsurprisingly) had a negative effect on birth families, adoptive parents and, most importantly, adoptees.

Authority

Court of Amsterdam

Date of judgment

10-12-2020

Date of publication

With the adoption assistance law , new regulations for adoption mediation come into force on April 1st. The law, which is based on findings from adoption research, largely implements the demands of the federal states and adoption placement practice. Many of the improvements that promote openness in particular during adoptions and strengthen the position of parents of origin also correspond to the recommendations of the 9th Family Report .

Federal Minister for Family Affairs Franziska Giffey:

"The new adoption assistance law takes a closer look at the needs of families and modernizes the adoption system: All adoptive families, the families of origin and above all the children can finally get the help and support they need more easily. The innovations improve advice and education of the child and the structures of placement. And there are now more binding guidelines for adoptions abroad in order to protect children from human trafficking. Many families and specialists in adoption placement have been waiting for all of this for a long time. As Federal Family Minister, it is particularly important to me: The new adoption assistance -The law ensures that adopted children grow up well, can go their own way and get to know their roots. "

The four building blocks of the Adoption Assistance Act

The Adoption Assistance Act consists of four components :

When Viktor Adolfsson was very young, he and a sister were adopted from Romania, and they grew up together in a family in Örebro.

But many more siblings remained in Romania, and in 2009 Viktor received help from the TV program Spårlöst to find them.

Not a day goes by without Viktor thinking about how grateful he is that he was adopted, and how much he wants to help his siblings to a better life.

Anna Björndahl

anna.bjorndahl@sverigesradio.se

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.

Until 2009, all adoptions from the United States concerned partial mediation adoption procedures. This meant that the Prospective Adoptive Parents (PAPs), after receiving permission from a Dutch adoption license holder, started the adoption procedure themselves through a self-established contact in America and took care of everything themselves. In 2009, the Dutch government decided against partial mediation in American adoption procedures. The main reason for this decision was the lack of insight into the details of an American adoption procedure. Partly for this reason, there was a sense that ‘things might not be completely right’ with adoptions from the USA For a long time, it remained uncertain what the future of the American adoption procedures might be. Especially when at a certain moment the American adoption contacts Michael Goldstein and Adoption ARC – both with long-term experience in intercountry adoption mediation to the Netherlands – stated that it would not be possible for them to work with the existing Dutch adoption license holders. This would have meant the end of adoptions from the United States.

Meanwhile, the Dutch Central Authority for Intercountry Adoption (CA) took over the complete adoption mediation responsibilities for these American contacts, although this should not have been the role of the CA in an adoption procedure, because the CA should monitor the adoption license holders and all the individual adoption procedures. However, this concerned a temporary situation, which also meant that the mediations from the United States would come to an end.

Some of the adoptive parents felt strongly about this, and in their free time and of their own free will they founded a new adoption license holder, applied for the license, asked permission to provide mediation services in the United States and in the Netherlands, and held meetings with Adoption ARC and Goldstein to establish new partnerships with them.

After putting a lot of time and energy into it, their efforts did not go unrewarded. The founding of this new adoption license holder, Adoption Foundation A New Way (Adoptiestichting A New Way) made it possible to continue with the adoptions from the United States, and to place these children with safe and loving families in the Netherlands: with hetero couple’s, individual applicants, and same-sex couples!

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A New Zealander who has fought for years to adopt her nieces and nephews from Ethiopia is now facing the possibility that one will have to be left behind - unless there is government intervention.

Ms Norman* filed for adoption in 2017, so the four children, whose parents disappeared in 2013, could live with her in New Zealand.

In Ethiopia, the children are under the care of another aunt, with financial support from Norman.

The children all share a small room with their aunt and her 10-year-old daughter.

Once rent is paid, there is only money left for the most basic of food, with no money remaining for other necessities such as clothes.

--------- Forwarded message ---------

From: ve_just.a.1-civil-justice(JUST)

Date: Tue 30. Mar 2021 at 16:33

Subject: Ares(2021)2200774 - [Re] Letter from SRJ regarding illegal adoptions - UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

To: DOHLE Arun

IN RECENT weeks, the political and security crisis in Haiti has escalated.  We sat down with Georgette Mulheir, a spokesperson for Defend Haiti’s Democracy, who explained the current crisis and outlined a roadmap to restore democracy.

Haiti has an unusual history.  In modern consciousness, it is most remembered for the devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake in 2010, that killed an estimated 200,000 people and the outpouring of assistance intended to help the country recover.  The efficacy of the aid programme was repeatedly questioned, with allegations of corruption and inefficiency.  More devastating still was the Oxfam scandal, where the charity was found to have covered up serious sexual abuse of vulnerable women and children by senior members of its Haiti team.

In 2014, Georgette Mulheir started working in Haiti, to help the country build a new system of protection and support services for the most vulnerable children and families.  She discovered a new form of child-trafficking that had exploded in Haiti since the earthquake, where fake orphanages were established, coercing and deceiving poor families to give up their children, so the orphanages could rake in massive donations from well-meaning churches and volunteers in the USA.

But more recently, Mulheir has become concerned that development work – including fighting child-trafficking – is on hold in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, due to a political and security crisis that has been building for two years. “The world cannot stand by and watch”, says Mulheir, “while peaceful protesters are beaten off the streets, or shot dead by police, as the country slides into dictatorship”.

In the Netherlands, on 8 February 2021, the so-called Joustra report , prepared by the Committee for the Study of International Adoption for the Ministry of Legal Protection, was published . The report presents studies of adoptions to the Netherlands from 23 countries with emphasis on the period 1967-1998 and special focus on adoptions from Bangladesh, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Colombia and Indonesia.

The conclusions speak for themselves: In all countries, irregularities and systematic blackmail of mothers and child trafficking have been identified - even after the introduction of the Hague Convention in 1998 - a convention whose main purpose is otherwise to ensure that international adoptions are carried out on a legal and ethically sound basis. .

The report has led the Netherlands to impose a temporary ban on adoption applicants, and it has not yet been decided whether the country will definitively shut down the placement of foreign children into childless families.

The Swedish government has just decided to conduct a similar study of adoptions to the country from the 1960s to the 1990s. The study also aims to account for the responsibilities of Swedish intermediary organizations and the state in any illegalities.

The background for the government decision is, among other things, an ongoing investigation in Chile, which shows that thousands of adoptions of Chilean children to Sweden and other countries have been made on an illegal basis, with false papers and without parental consent. In addition, adult Swedish adoptees via the association chileadoption.se, among others, have worked for years through various media channels to inform the public about the systematic fraud within adoption.