Stop exploiting adoption suffering
Adoptees who want to discover their original identity are forced to turn to a program such as Spoorloos . They have nowhere else to go. There should be legal provisions regulating access to the right to identity of adoptees.
Four victims of the TV program Spoorloos want compensation from KRO-NCRV because the editors provided them with false information about their original identity. Since the late 1960s, more than 40,000 people from approximately eighty different countries have lost their original identity through intercountry adoption to the Netherlands. 1
Since 1990, Spoorloos has focused on these adoptees. The editors promise them a 'match' with their original family, in order to entertain the audience and generate viewing figures. Spoorloos confronts adoptees on television with lost family, deprived identity and their deepest pain.
By participating in Spoorloos , adoptees relinquish their right to privacy in exchange for a possible match with their original family. This also concerns false matches, as became clear after research into the TV program Oplichters tackled in 2022.
Adoptees are forced to turn to Spoorloos because they have insufficient resources and support to discover their original identity themselves. That is inherent to intercountry adoption. Adoptees cannot go anywhere else, not even at the recently established expertise center for intercountry adoption (INEA).
State obligation
INEA does not support individual 'searches' to discover the original identity of adoptees. 2 This was determined by the Minister for Legal Protection Franc Weerwind. How can it be that public money goes to the broadcaster that produces Spoorloos , while the minister refuses to provide individual support for access to the right to identity of adoptees?
By refusing individual support, the minister disregards his state responsibility. After all, he is responsible for the future of intercountry adoption to the Netherlands. By failing to take this responsibility, he contributes to the current and future suffering of adoptees who do not have legally regulated access to their right to identity.
States must care for adoptees and ensure that they receive the necessary assistance to know their origins. The United Nations decided this in a joint statement in 2022. 3 That declaration sets out state obligations to prevent illegal intercountry adoption and aims to guarantee access to the right to the truth for victims of illegal intercountry adoption.
The Dutch State will have to take measures to this end. In the context of legal equality, the state should provide adoptees with at least €3,700 in subsidy, the same as prospective parents received for intercountry adoption. Adoptees can therefore, for example, obtain valuable professional analyzes from international genealogy experts, based on their DNA matches, in order to restore their original identity.
Subsidy
According to the UN Declaration, access to the right to identity is not an optional matter: to facilitate the right to the truth, states will assist each other in searching for, identifying and locating victims of illegal intercountry adoptions.
Broadcaster KRO-NCRV is financed with public money - the broadcaster uses that money to make a program like Spoorloos . Instead, the state should provide subsidies to adoptees so that they can recover their original identity. The minister and the legislator should therefore consider guaranteeing the right to identity. Alternatively, a trial process should put an end to the legal inequality 4 between adoptive parents and adoptees.
The right to identity, origin information and history of origins is a human right for which adoptees should no longer have to turn to Spoorloos . It is unacceptable that the right to privacy of Spoorloos participants is violated in exchange for public exploitation of the reunion with their original families. The executive and legislature must now take responsibility for the fact that there are currently no legal provisions governing access to the right to identity of adoptees. This must change as soon as possible.
This opinion appears in NJB 2023/1958, episode 28