On 14^th February 2012 the first working meeting was organized between representatives of the accredited organizations in Bulgaria (AOMO) and Mrs. Velina Todorova, the deputy Minister of Justice responsible for international adoption.

....,.......jjjTwo main issues were brought up for discussion:

1. Entering the children in the National register and the transfer of their files to the International register – how to shorten the waiting times and make the procedures easier.

We broadly discussed the problem related with the fact that ¾ of the children placed in foster families are not entered into the registers which is a 100 % violation of the law and even a more serious violation of the basic right of every child to be raised in a family.

Mrs. Velina Todorova committed herself to discussing with the Intercountry Adoptions Directorate the problems related with the registration of children in the International Registeraiming to accelerate the process.

2. The work of the International Adoptions Council (IAC) – how to improve its effectiveness and transparency. In relation with this issue we discussed the fact that since the policy of the Bulgarian government is to gradually close down the institutions for children (till 2020), the MoJ in its capacity of Central authority should support this policy and speed up the adoption of the children by persons whose usual place of residence is abroad. Furthermore, the Bulgarian MoJ has declared that it complies with the resolutions of the European parliament concerning intercountry adoption, then it should take into consideration its recommendations as of February 2011 and namely that intercountry adoption should be made easier. In this regard we made a lot of suggestions which would lead to increasing the number of proposals/referrals made at each session of the IAC.

The main part of the discussion on this issue was about the principle of “the first 50”. This principle is related with full transparency and it was applied in 2008 and 2009. The idea is the following: the IAC lists on the official webpage of the MoJ the numbers (together with the dates of entering applicants into the register) of the first 50 couples waiting for a child. If this is done, the updates that the IAC currently provides will not be so unclear. In this way all applicants will be able to monitor the manner of making proposals/referrals and make sure that another family registered after them and having exactly the same requirements for a child will not receive a proposal/referral before them; they will be able to check whether the principle of consecutiveness is applied and the full transparency of the work of the IAC will be ensured. This will also give us more specific information about the proposals/referrals – we will know to applicants with which year of registration the IAC is making proposals/referrals and this will enable us to make approximate prognoses when the next proposal/referral can be expected.

Deputy Minister Todorova promised to think about another suggestion: at each session of the IAC, as a guarantee for the transparency of its work, at the principle of rotation, one representative of an accredited organization to be present.