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Sherin Mathews was first reported missing from her Texas home in October 2017, triggering a large search operation

A US father accused of killing his adopted three-year-old daughter has been sentenced to life in jail after pleading guilty to a lesser charge.

US media said the unanimous verdict came after Wesley Mathews confessed to "injury of a child by omission".

A Perth couple who were accused of abusing their adopted daughter and making her sleep in a shipping container have been found guilty by a jury.

After a 10-day trial, the jury retired to deliberate on Thursday and returned with a guilty verdict late on Friday afternoon.

The couple were found guilty on two separate charges of deprivation of liberty, and having control and care of a child and engaging in conduct that could result in the child’s suffering.

The guilty verdict comes after the jury heard the girl, who along with her parents cannot be identified for legal reasons, told a child protection worker her adoptive parents beat her with a metal pipe and tennis racket and cut her hair off.

The girl said on more than one occasion, her mother dragged her out of the house and beat her with a metal pipe.

Bina is an Indian intercountry adoptee residing in the Netherlands. She has been active in the field of adoption since 2005. She began as a volunteer chairperson at Wereldkindern in the northern Netherlands region. She attempted to give intercountry adoptees a voice in a world where adoption organizations (agencies) and adoptive parents usually speak for adoptees.

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In January 2015, she co-founded and currently co-administers DNA India Adoptees which is a Facebook community with more than 425 Indian adoptees from the Netherlands, Belgium, and other parts of the world. This is a platform for and by Indian adoptees where they share opinions, ask questions, discuss Indian culture, DNA testing, roots and searching, etc. Since 2018, Bina was invited and has represented DNA India Adoptees several times to discuss relevant issues with the Dutch government.

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Bina is a Senior team manager with an educational background of applied psychology, NLP and Systemic work. Recently, Bina began her own practice Bina Coaching and is also part of the Adoption and Foster Coaching (AFC) network founded by Hilbrand Westra. AFC is an organization of adopted adoption coaches with the aim to support mature adopters who need pre-adoption care. Bina does all this alongside her professional work as an Operational Manager at the Dutch Tax office.

The number of children adopted from foreign countries is down and adoption organizations believe they know why.

Tens of thousands of foreign children are adopted annually by American families, who rescue many of them from orphanages, but by 2018 the number had dropped to a little over 4,000.

The problem can be traced back to the U.S. State Department and to one person in particular, Susan Jacobs, who oversaw the federal agency's adoption division during the Obama administration.

Jacobs, whose State Department title was special advisor for international children’s issues, penned an April op-ed acknowledging the drop in adoptions but denied the federal agency is responsible for what she called “plummeting” numbers.

The adoptions have decreased, she claims, because foreign countries have tightened their rules due to loose federal oversight that endangers children’s safety.

Wesley Mathews, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of causing injury to Sherin.

Wesley Mathews, the adoptive father of Sherin Mathews – the three-year-old who was found dead in a Texas culvert in 2017 – has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in his sentence. At his trial for murder, which happened on Monday, Wesley pleaded guilty on charges of causing injury to the child by omission. This charge comes with a lighter sentence than capital murder and tampering with evidence – the other charges against him.

Wesley, who hails from Kerala, had been charged with capital murder after his special needs adoptive daughter was found dead. If he is convicted under this charge, he faces the possibility of a life sentence without parole. However, having pled guilty to first-degree injury to a child by omission, Wesley may get probation or life imprisonment with possibility of parole after three decades.

His guilty plea was apparently not a deal with the prosecutors or a bargain.

Wesley and his wife Sini, who were natives of Kerala, adopted Sherin from an orphanage in Bihar in July 2016. Sherin disappeared in October 2017, and Wesley initially claimed that he had sent her out in the wee hours of the morning on October 6 that year as punishment for not drinking her milk. On October 22, 2017, Sherin’s body was recovered from a culvert under a road about a kilometre from the Mathews’ home. The cause of Sherin’s death could not be investigated as the body had decomposed.

Volunteering and orphanage tourism abroad

Do you want to do volunteer work in a developing country? Top! It is important that Dutch people come into contact with other cultures and commit themselves to another. But prepare well and avoid involvement in projects that are harmful to vulnerable groups.

It happens regularly: Dutch people who are committed to a private development project. Or Dutch young people doing an internship or volunteering abroad. Well-known destinations are Cambodia, India, Philippines, Nepal, Kenya, Suriname, Uganda, Zambia and South Africa.

Volunteering in orphanages in particular is popular, but often has (unintended) negative consequences. The Dutch government does not recommend volunteering in orphanages.

Poverty

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Victims of widespread adoption trafficking in Sri Lanka, seeking truth about their origins

Paris (AFP) - Over thirty years later, French victims of widespread adoption trafficking in Sri Lanka, and their adoptive parents, have embarked on a difficult quest to shed light on their origins.

"Many parents feel guilt or are still in denial," confide to AFP Jean-Noel and Veronique Piaser-Moyen, victims of this scandal recently revealed. "There are three victims: the biological mothers, the children, and we the adoptive parents, we need to hear that we are not guilty".

The couple who adopted a baby - Maria - in 1985 in Sri Lanka, discovered recently that he had unwittingly participated in a large international adoption trade. The latter could concern some 11,000 babies stolen or sold by various intermediaries to Western families, according to surveys conducted by several French and foreign media.

The existence of this traffic has been recognized by the Sri Lankan government in 2017.

Brussels, 25 June 2019

What is the Brussels IIa Regulation?

The Brussels IIa Regulation is the cornerstone of EU judicial cooperation in cross-border matrimonial matters (divorce, separation, marriage annulment) and matters of parental responsibility, including custody and access rights, and international child abduction. The Regulation has applied in all Member States, except Denmark, since 1 March 2005.

With the rising number of international families, now estimated at 16 million, cross-border disputes on family matters have increased in the EU. There are about 140,000 international divorces per year in the EU. There are around 1,800 cases of parental child abduction within the EU every year.

The Council adopted today improvements to the EU rules ("Brussels IIa Regulation") that protect children in the context of cross-border disputes relating to parental responsibility and child abduction. The new rules ("Brussels IIa Recast Regulation") make court proceedings clearer, faster and more efficient. They are based on the proposal made by the European Commission in 2016.