"Government must stop foreign adoptions," Amanda has been fighting for years
The cabinet must put an end to adoptions from abroad as soon as possible. That is one of the recommendations from the upcoming report of the Joustra Committee on the abuses in foreign adoptions. "What we have known for years is now finally being recognized," victims respond to Hart van Nederland .
Parents who gave up children without knowing it, children who subsequently received a false adoption report and can therefore no longer find their biological parents. Much went wrong in the adoptions between 1967 and 1997. Monday the report of the committee headed by Tjibbe Joustra that has investigated the role and responsibility of the Dutch government in Indonesia, Brazil, Colombia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka will be published.
Ghost parents
One of those adopted children is Amanda Janssen from Nieuwegein. "I have ghost parents," she tells Hart van Nederland . "I know I was born of something, but from what?"
Amanda's life was turned upside down when she and her adopted sister set out to investigate her origins. But at the hospital she found out that her whole life, her name, her date of birth, belonged to someone else. "At the hospital they said: your document is false." The sister, who had always been told to be a thoroughbred sister, turned out not to be related.
What could have happened? "My search led to the brother of my adopted sister, in Sri Lanka. Her family gave up a baby. I came to the Netherlands on the papers of that baby, but we don't know where that girl is."
Thousands of victims
Amanda isn't the only one who has this happened. "Thousands of people have no idea where their roots are," she explains. According to her, poor parents in Sri Lanka were persuaded to give up their child under false pretenses. "At a monastery it was said: we look after your child, you make sure you get your life in order. But if that was the case, they would not get their child back."
The Joustra Committee looked at abuses from the period 1967-1997, but also found that the problems are still ongoing today. The advice is therefore to stop foreign adoptions immediately because too much goes wrong. "That is very nice for us," says Amanda. "For us as adopted children, recognition is the number one priority. That is already a huge step, a feeling of 'eh huh, finally'".
Importance of adoptive parents too great
Hilbrand Westra has been fighting for decades to recognize that there are abuses. As an adopted child from Korea, he has been calling for the adoption system to be tackled since 1989. "There is an unbalanced balance of interests. The entire adoption procedure is designed in the interests of parents. Adoption agencies have acted carelessly in this regard."
He does not yet know whether anything will happen to this report. "We already had another report four years ago, with the same conclusions. That also disappeared in the drawer." He is therefore calling for a parliamentary investigation. "Now an advance has been taken to implement this committee, I am glad they dared it. But I suspect that the House of Representatives will not put the subject high on the agenda."
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