Jonkers offers Parliament a petition about adoptions: 'Minister must reconsider decision'

On Tuesday, Jaap Jonkers from Joure presented a petition to the permanent parliamentary committee for Justice and Security, for the preservation of international adoptions. The signatories do not agree with the decision of outgoing minister Sander Dekker to temporarily suspend international adoptions because of previous abuses.

Photo: ANP Photo

With the decision of Minister Dekker, adopted children are victims, say Jonkers and 13,500 other signatories. Jonkers himself was adopted from Bolivia as a little boy.

"The MPs were impressed. It is now up to them to make sure that the minister reconsiders his decision," says Jonkers. "Good questions were asked and compliments given."

Report

According to Jonkers, the minister's decision is based on an investigation that is dated. "I will give an example: one of the five countries that the committee has thoroughly investigated is Indonesia," Jonkers begins.

"The committee has written extensively about everything that went wrong there. Only the committee fails to say that we have stopped adopting from Indonesia to the Netherlands since 1983. That was almost forty years ago. At the same time, abuses in Indonesia before 1983 are being presented as a burden of proof that today's adoptions should also be questioned," says Jonkers.

Jonkers hopes that the petition will validate the report. "That means that there will be a check to see if what it says is correct," he says. Jonkers assumes that it will turn out that this is not the case and that Minister Dekker may reconsider his decision.

Jaap Jonkers about the petition