Every year, thousands of adopted individuals begin and end their journey to find their biological parents in Pune and other cities of Maharashtra that have traditionally been adoption hubs of the country.

Written by Sunanda Mehta | Updated: July 11, 2017 7:52 am
adoption, adoption in inida, adopted children, Vidya-Liselotte Sundberg, Child Trafficking, adoption agency

Adoption centres like to promote happy stories of reunions that warm the cockles of the heart of all readers.

Adoption process: Financially able, 40-plus single women top on listAdoption process: Financially able, 40-plus single women top on list
Eleven states, Union Territories have no 0-2 age group children for adoptionEleven states, Union Territories have no 0-2 age group children for adoption

Sikh couple in UK not allowed to adopt ‘white child,’ told to adopt from India insteadSikh couple in UK not allowed to adopt ‘white child,’ told to adopt from India instead

Sitting opposite me, her eyes well up with tears and her voice chokes as she gets to the point in the story when she first saw her mother. Till now Vidya-Liselotte Sundberg had been quite in control of her emotions as she took me through her journey from Sweden to Pune to Nashik, detailing her search for her biological mother. It was a search that had consumed the 39- year-old singer for the better part of her life, till it ended in May this year when she finally found her, after years of effort.
Looking at her long black wavy hair, her easy smile and expressive eyes, now slightly red and covered with a thin film of water, my heart went out to the girl who, for no fault of hers, carried this emotional baggage from birth. One that must have ravaged her and been responsible for a thousand unasked, unanswered questions all through her growing years and adulthood. But then that is the harsh truth of every adoptee’s life.

I remembered another story I was following about two years ago about another adoptee who had just been reunited with her birth mother. The case was remarkable for two reasons. One, because here it was the mother who had initiated a search for her daughter whom she had abandoned — in most cases, it’s the child who looks for his/her biological parent.
And second, because the mother had embarked on this journey at the behest of her son — a legitimate son who encouraged her to find her illegitimate child. The reunion between mother, son and daughter, who had flown down from Norway (where she had been taken away after adoption) was thick with a thousand emotions.

The common thread in both searches, other than the immense emotional turmoil involved, was the fatigue and defeat all the characters had experienced hundreds of times in their search in terms of bureaucratic delays, hurdles and apathy.

Every year, thousands of adopted people from all over the world look for their biological parents. For a large number of them, the destination is Pune and/or other cities of Maharashtra that have traditionally been adoption hubs of the country. Adoption centres like to promote happy stories of reunions that warm the cockles of the heart of all readers. But between the lines is another story that often remains untold. Of the innumerable hurdles and problems that beset such endeavours. Problems, that unlike the emotional toll, could have been avoided or at least lessened.

For the longest time, the main problem was an outright denial of information to the adopted individuals as per law. In 2011, following a spirited and tumultuous battle fought by many adoptees like Arun Dolhe, the law was modified and this right was granted to the adoptees by way of instructing the adoption homes to facilitate root searches. But soon a rider followed – no third party was allowed to do the search and navigate their way through the complicated path on their behalf.
Opinion | The Importance Of Being President Pranab Mukherjee

The rule may have been borne of noble intentions but given that most of these adoptees live abroad, it put severe restrictions on their efforts. For one, it meant that they would personally have to come down every time to follow up every link that surfaced. Add to that the inevitable insensitivity of the system, reluctance of many adoption homes to further the search given that some adoptions may have not been strictly by the book and red tapism endemic to government institutions in this country, really amounted to deterring rather than encouraging root searches.

Anjali Pawar, a consultant with Against Child Trafficking, a Dutch organisation that conducts root searches for adopted children and who has had over 40 successes in the last eight years, says denying third-party help to adoptees is one of the most debilitating measures put in place. Most of these children, who are invariably raised abroad, don’t know the language or the culture, and can’t even read their files that they are given after a Herculean effort to obtain them, says Pawar. She often conducts these searches on behalf of the adoptees now after obtaining their Power of Attorneys.

“So what the law has done is just increased the paperwork,” Pawar points out, adding that allowing third-party searches with strictures in place and the active involvement of lawyers and NGOs is probably the way ahead if any government is serious about making roots searches easier.
Instead, what India has are regular announcements and rules that far from helping the hapless adoptees, compound their struggles and complications. Ten days ago, the Women and Child Development Ministry announced that it will set up cradles at police stations, hospitals and orphanages across the country to encourage parents who cannot bring up their children to leave them there instead of abandoning them in garbage bins, railway tracks and river sides. The “humane’’ move, added the Ministry, would also help bridge the gap between 14,000 adoption requests and the availability of a mere 600 children.

The move, according to adoption experts all across the country, is a legal way of telling parents that it’s alright to give up unwanted children for adoption when researches all over the world have emphasized that nothing can be worse for a child, whose parents are alive, than to grow up in an adopted family. Every research on emotional well-being of children has agreed that a poverty-stricken and issue-laden biological family is far better for a child than a wealthy, educated but adopted one. The thousands of searches launched every year by adopted children only reiterate this view.

I look at Vidya who has returned to Pune from Sweden within a mere one month of first meeting her mother and cannot help but agree. It’s time not to look at the gap between the number of requests for adoption vis-à-vis children abandoned and make laws that may end up encouraging abandonments, but work to reducing abandonments altogether.

And when this is not possible we need to adopt a more sensitive approach to the other side of the spectrum – extend every possible bureaucratic, financial and emotional assistance to those who decide to travel from halfway round the world to India to look for their roots – and through that their mental peace.
Adoption Requests Pour In For Bareilly Rape Victim’s New Born

Years ago Indian societal constraints may have denied them their birthright of living with their parents. Now the least that a (hopefully) more evolved society and government can do to make up is to minimise hurdles and maximise support to help the adopted individuals connect with the broken links to make their lives whole again.
Sunanda Mehta is the Resident Editor of Indian Express’ Pune edition. She tweets @sunandamehta

(Google Translation)

The alarm first broke out in the state of West Bengal, where three babies were found in cookie cases: among the 11 detainees were doctors and officials

AUTHOR
ELENA DEL ESTAL. DELHI (INDIA)
01.08.2017

David and Desiree were eagerly awaiting the arrival of their two adopted daughters, but the reality was not what they had planned: shortly after the two sisters arrived from India to their foster home in the United States , the new parents realized That the girls did not really want to be there . “When they finally dared to speak, they told us the truth: they were not orphans, but had been stolen and sold. They even threatened them to lie in interviews with the embassy officials, ” said Desiree Smolin, an adoptive mother, when the media echoed her case.

It took the Smolin six years to find the biological mother of Manjula and Bhagya. In 1995, Lakshmi had sent his two daughters to a center in Hyderabad, where they were told they would receive a good education. Actually it was Action for Social Development , an adoption agency. He went to visit them several times, always seeing them from a distance. Soon they told him that for the best adaptation of the girls to the center it was preferable that he stopped visiting them. When Lakshmi asked to recover his daughters, in the middle they demanded a great sum of money impossible for her. In fact the procedures for the adoption of his daughters had already begun.

“We adopted Manjula and Bhagya because they told us they were orphans,” David Smolin tells Lakshmi in a letter that the adoptive family also made public. At Christmas 2005 and thanks to the help of the organization Against Child Trafficking (ACT), one of the girls, already adolescent, reunited with his mother. An emotional videotaped encounter in which Lakshmi, embracing Manjula, repeats over and over again in tears that he thought he would never see his daughter again.

The case of Manjula and Bhagya is not isolated. Although there are no official figures on how many Indian minors have been adopted without the actual consent of their biological parents, the Office of the Crime Registry states in its last report that there were 668 cases of abduction for adoption in 2015 , A figure that has increased over previous years (407 cases in 2014, 160 in 2013).

The discovery of several baby traffic networks in late 2016 and early 2017, again evidence that diffuse line drawn between child trafficking and legal adoptions: baby robberies of clinics that ended up being given in adoption both within India as in other countries. The alarm jumped first in the state of West Bengal, where three babies were found in cookie cases . Up to 11 detainees, including doctors and health personnel, maternity clinics or alleged NGOs and public officials falsifying documents. Police estimate that between 45 and 50 babies could have been trafficked through this network and that 300,000 rupees would have been paid for boys and 100.00 for girls (4.150€ and 1.400€ respectively).

A few weeks later, another case in the same state came to light, with Juhi Chowdhury, Secretary of State in West Bengal by the BJP (same party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ), for her relationship with Chandana Chakravarty, director Of the adoption center Bimala Sishu Griha and alleged leader of this network of trafficking of minors .

Chakravarty stated that Chowdhury was helping her to get funding and licenses, and that she introduced her to other BJP members in Delhi. According to the police, at least 17 children between the ages of six months and 14 years of age who had been adopted by couples from Australia, the United States, France and Spain would have been sold through this network, paying between 10,000 and 20,000 euros per child. A total of 7 people were arrested in this case, including the Officers for the Protection of Minors in the districts of Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling and a member of the Committee for the Well-being of Minors.

Adoption process

In India children can be adopted following the Indian Adoption Act of 1956 and the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000. In addition, as a signatory to the Hague Convention, it must follow the guidelines it sets. The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) is the only government agency through which domestic and international adoptions can be managed in India. Adoptions that are processed through another channel would be illegal. According to public data offered by CARA from 2010 to March 2017 more than 30,000 children were adopted in India and there were over 3,500 international adoptions .

Before the process begins, each child must be declared “free for adoption” by the Child Welfare Committee (CWC). This mandatory certificate is the official proof that the child is orphaned or abandoned. CARA Secretary Deepak Kumar himself explains to El Confidential in a telephone conversation that in order to obtain this certificate, the child’s information is collated with reports of missing children and an advertisement with information and a photograph of the minor is placed in the local newspaper (during two months for children under two years and four months for those over this age). If at that time no one claims the child and there are no reports that he is missing, he is declared free for adoption.

“In India, adopting a child without prior verification is almost impossible, ” says Kumar. And he vehemently states on two occasions during the conversation that children who are adopted through the government system of CARA are “almost negative” and there are “very few possibilities” that they have been trafficked. But the actual research done on the origin of children and the way these certificates are issued by the CWCs of each district raises doubts among organizations and activists who have for several years denounced that under the mantle of adoptions actually trafficking of minors is concealed.

“There are a number of allegations that people running some clinics often report to mentally unstable mothers or single mothers who have just given birth that their baby was born dead. Then they take care that another woman appears before the CWC with the baby, saying that it is hers and that she wants to surrender him to take care of him, “said a member of the CWC of the district of Jalpaiguri on condition of anonymity, according to the newspaper Hindustan Times .

“The moment we find them [adoption centers that deal with minors] we close them, and we will continue to do so,” is the sharp response of Kumar, Secretary of CARA.

Convention VS Convention

This official response does not convince Arun Dohle, a member and one of the founders of the organization Against Child Trafficking (ACT) who signals the facility with which it is possible to convert to legal adoption what in the beginning it was not.

“Basically everything is decided on paper, and once the child has entered the system, what has happened in the beginning is somehow corrected. The following steps are followed and everything seems to be legal. It is impossible to see that it is actually trafficking in minors, “he says via Skype from Germany .

Dohle speaks from experience. It took him 17 years to find his birth mother. He was born in India and was adopted with two months by a couple in Germany. He always suspected that his mother did not consent to his adoption and was finally able to corroborate his suspicions when he first met her in 2010. It had been 37 years since his mother, who became pregnant without being married, left him in a facility to be looked after, not to be taken out of the country and given to other parents.

For Dohle the problem lies in the difference in approach between the Hague Convention and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The second establishes international adoptions as a last resort and only if the possibilities offered by a temporary family, orphanages or shelters within the country of origin of the child have been exhausted. The Hague Convention, however, although it does not establish international adoption as the first option, it does relegate the other types of solutions to the last resort.

“You have to stop legal traffic and then you will stop illegal traffic,” Dohle said. In several interviews he has been cited as a staunch detractor of adoptions, and for that reason he now very much needs his words: “I am not against adoptions, I am in favor of the rights of children . What I am against is the current system of international adoptions because it creates a regulated market for minors.”

The money

There is little data on the benefits of international adoptions. The report on organized crime in the European Union of 2005 amounts the value of the “trafficking in children” market to 1 trillion euros a year related to illegal adoptions, involving more than one million children.

David Smollin, who after his personal experience as the adoptive father of Manjula and Bhagya became a legal expert on international adoptions, has directed several investigations into these matters for the University of Samford in Alabama where he is director of the Center for Children, Law and Ethics. In his article ” Intercountry adoptions as child trafficking,” he argues that since adoption costs between $ 5,000 and $ 10,000, “when that money goes to nations with a per capita income of less than $ 1,000 (and often less than $ 500) it is extraordinarily difficult to prevent adoption from becoming child trafficking.”

The conclusions of the same article add that, far from arguing that all international adoptions constitute the illicit sale of children, and “being certain that there are many international adoptions that are ethical, where money has not played any illicit role, however, The system as a whole is corrupt because it has no effective means to prevent international adoptions from degenerating into child trafficking. ”

According to a report by Save the Children, between 50 and 90 percent of children living in orphanages around the world actually have at least one parent or family member alive and willing to care for them , Being poverty and not the lack of a guardian which leads the families to enter the minors in an orphanage.

When Arun gets one of the almost obligatory questions he says he is often asked, (that if he had preferred to stay in India instead of being adopted), he responds calmly but surely. “It is an unjust question because I have nothing to compare with ” – a nervous giggle escapes him and he continues “I had a life in India that I was not allowed to live because someone thought that I had to be rescued, and then I was rescued. I can only accept my life as it is now. I cannot say that I regret anything, but what I can say is that adopting me without the consent of my mother was a crime.”

AMRITA MADHUKALYA | Mon, 7 Aug 2017-07:45am , New Delhi , DNA
Australia had suspended adoption involving Indians since 2011

Vivek and his wife Ramya gave up a perfect life in Sydney earlier this year and relocated to India. The couple, who wanted to adopt a child, were told by officials that non-resident Indian couples are not allowed to adopt Indian children in Australia. In Chennai, where they are based now, Vivek is finding it hard to rebuild his career.

Australia, along with Canada, various Middle Eastern countries, and the US, do not permit NRI couples to adopt Indian children in their countries. It has now been learnt that Woman and Child Development minister Maneka Gandhi has now written to officials of the Australian High Commission to come up with a solution. Gandhi has also asked the officials to fast-track a few adoption cases, including Vivek and Ramya’s.

Gandhi had also issued a DO to Foreign Secretary Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, but the Ministry of External Affairs, however, did not pursue the matter. Former WCD secretary Leena Nair had also written to the MEA.

Australia had suspended adoption involving Indians since 2011. “The officials told us that the reason for the suspension was an adoption racket involving Indian officials,” said Vivek, who says that while he’s finding it difficult to find a job here, his former employers in Australia want him to return.

Col Deepak Kumar, CEO of the Child Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), said that apart from Australia, countries from the Middle East, Canada and in some cases the USA bar NRIs from adopting. “The Authorised Adoption Foreign Agency (AAFA) in the receiving country is supposed to carry out home checks and issue no-objection certificates, and then carry out post-adoption checks. In Australia, the designated AAFA has refused to carry out these checks, without which, we cannot let the child go,” said Col Deepak.

He said that there have been cases where Indian couples have adopted babies in India and taken them under the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act. Australia, Canada and the USA are all signatories to the Hague Adoption Convention.

In Canada, Col Deepak says the country’s adoption authorities give parents no choice for adoption, whereas as per Indian laws, overseas parents are given a choice of two children. “The Canadian authorities want us to change the adoption laws in India to bring down screening choices to one, which is not possible. We have communicated to them that India will have no problem if they do not give NRI couples in Canada any screening choice, but not much has happened since,” he said.

In USA, inter-country adoptions are allowed only when one of the prospective parents is an overseas India citizen (OCI). Adoptions are not allowed when both the prospective parents are NRIs, said Col Deepak. As per US adoption laws, inter-country adoptions involving two NRIs are deemed as an Indian adoption case, and dependent visas are given only after the child has lived in the USA for over two years. Because of the tangle, Indian parents need to issue a tourist visa for their children every six months. CARA has written to officials in the American Embassy.

Middle Eastern countries under the rule of Islamic law do not allow adoption, and several countries are not signatories to the Hague Adoption Convention. In the absence of a process and of an AAFA, CARA has engaged social workers to carry out home-checks. Yet, several complaints come in routinely.

On the other hand, all the countries that bar adoptions to Indian couples carry out routine inter-country adoptions with India. In 2015-16, American couples adopted 222 Indian children, while in 2016-17, over 213 children were adopted. Canadians adopted 30 children from India in 2015-16, and 35 in 2016-17. In all, there were 430 inter-country adoptions in 2013-14, 374 in 2014-15, 666 in 2015-16, and 578 in 2016-17.

Vivek says that as of now, the only way out was to be a part of India’s adoption process, which can take anywhere from three months to a year, and raise the child for two years, and then move back to Australia. “The financial loss aside, my time, too, is running out,” said the 42-year-old.

Source: https://nos.nl
TODAY, 20 September 2017
(Google Translation)

Sri Lanka acknowledges that there were baby farms in the country in the 1980s, or places where women were conceiving to meet the need for adoptable children. That’s what the Sri Lankan health minister said in the [Dutch] Zembla television show.

It is for the first time that the Sri Lankan government admits that the baby farms existed. The stories about baby farms were always dismissed as rumors. Minister Senaratne now says that its existence was the reason to stop international adoption in 1987.

Senaratne takes up the case and initiates an investigation into fraud at the time of adoption. He also says he is taking the initiative for a separate desk where parents and children can test their DNA.

Making babies

How the baby farms looked exactly is not clear, says Zembla reporter Erwin Otten in the NOS Radio 1 Journal . “They are not there anymore, so we do not know. Well, we know that there were places where men and women were gathered who made babies together, and were then traded on the adoption market.”

There was a small club of people behind the fraud, says Otten. “These were for example lawyers and child protection people who found out where to find vulnerable people, who offered money, even though it was not much.”

Pregnant women were given money in the hospital to give up their child.
Zembla reporter Erwin Otten

Fraudless practices also took place in hospitals in Sri Lanka, says Otten. “Pregnant women in the hospital were given money to get their child, so the hospitals work with the “adoptive mafia “, as we call it.”

Otten spoke to a woman who lost her newborn child in the hospital. “She got her child through a caesarean section. Her husband saw the doctor walking out of the hospital with the child.” When the doctor returned, he said that the child had died and buried, but he did not say where. Later that hospital appeared to be a door hatch for adoption children. ”

The broadcast Adoptiebedrog part 2 is available tonight at 21:15 on NPO 2.

In the 1980s about 11,000 children from Sri Lanka were adopted. About 4000 of them went to the Netherlands, says Otten. The Netherlands was the biggest buyer.

Last May, Zembla already announced that the adoption files of children who came to the Netherlands from the Sri Lanka in the 1980s were widely falsified . The women who left the children often did not appear to be the biological mother. Also, brothers and sisters of the adoptive children were kept secret and travel documents were manually provided with new birth dates.

Dijkhoff

State Secretary Dijkhoff announces that he is going to see if there is a role for the Dutch government in the investigation in Sri Lanka. Thus he looks into which organizations and persons in the Netherlands were involved in the adoptions.

Source: https://ast.dk
(Google Translation)

The National Board is now writing to the authorities in Sri Lanka for information on adoptions in the 1980s.
09/26/2017

We do this after reviewing the media about irregularities in adoptions from Sri Lanka. We have become aware that there may have been a problem based on a review of a documentary film shown on the Dutch television.

According to the review of Denmark, Denmark, together with, among others, Holland and Sweden, has received children incorrectly from Sri Lanka in the 1980s.

Based on descriptions, we can not assess whether adoptions to Denmark are subject to possible irregularities. The information is too diffuse to identify problems in Danish cases that were then subject to completely different rules than today.

What does the National Board do?

We follow the matter closely. We are in contact with the adoption authorities in other countries, which are in the same situation in the media, and we are also addressing the authorities in Sri Lanka for more information.

Then we will evaluate whether the information allows us to do more.

There is no rule set or a roadmap for handling a situation like this one. Therefore, we try to get more knowledge about what it is about and whether the Danish cases may be affected.

Can something similar happen today?

It is an incredibly unfortunate situation if children have been abducted on an improper basis. Therefore, today there are very fixed rules and procedures for international adoption. They must ensure the protection of the child in the process and the proper guidance of the biological family.

There is both an international convention (The Hague Convention of 1993) and Danish adoption legislation.

The further process

We will try to find out if Danish cases are affected by the authorities in Sri Lanka.

We write more when we have new information in the case.

Last updated 27.09.2017

What happens to Indian children after they are given up for adoption to NRI/ overseas parents?
Megha Varier
Monday, October 23, 2017 – 17:45

Saraswati was an infant when she was abandoned by her parents in Gaya district in Bihar. She was taken in by an NGO based out of Nalanda. When she was two-and-half years old, a Kerala couple Wesley Mathews and Sini Mathews, adopted her in July 2016.

Saraswati became Sherin and started living with the couple and their 3-year-old daughter in Texas. What could have been a fairytale for a poor child from Bihar has now become a nightmare. Sherin has been missing since the first week of October, and on October 22, police found a dead body that they believe could be hers.

Negligence of parents?

After Sherin went missing, Wesley was charged for abandoning and endangering a child, and his elder daughter was taken away by Child Protection Services (CPS). Wesley had told the police that he had sent the child out at 3 am as punishment for not drinking milk, and she went missing.

In a startling revelation, CPS said that they had paid a visit to the couple once before this, but have not disclosed which child had been facing trouble.

Many have accused the parents of harming the child because she was an adopted child with special needs.

Silence from CARA

The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) set up in 2003 under the Women and Child Development Ministry, is the statutory body that functions as a nodal body for adoption of Indian children and is mandated to monitor and regulate in-country and inter-country adoptions.

It’s been more than a year since Sherin was adopted and taken away from India, what has CARA done to follow up on the child? Does CARA’s responsibilities end after an adoption is through and the child is flown out of the country?

According to the follow-up guidelines published in CARA’s website:

“The Authorised Foreign Adoption Agency or the Central Authority or Indian diplomatic mission or Government department concerned, as the case may be, shall report the progress of the adopted child for two years from the date of arrival of the adopted child in the receiving country, on a quarterly basis during the first year and on six monthly basis in the second year, by uploading online in the Child Adoption Resource Information and Guidance System in the format provided in Schedule XII along with photographs of the child.”
Elaborating on the follow-up mechanism, a CARA official told TNM that in Sherin Mathews’ case, the foreign adoption agency Holt International is the body that is entitled to submit follow-up reports.

“The foreign agency is supposed to do the post-adoption follow-ups, by making home visits, studying whether the child has adjusted to the new environment and if the child is happy living with the adoptive parents,” the official said.

Although TNM reached out to Holt International, the agency withheld information citing their policy of confidentiality.

Sujata Mody, a researcher on adoption, said that in the case of international adoptions, it was tough to keep track.

“Many children are abandoned after adoption. Once the adoptive parents abandon them, it is the local authorities, or the local child care bodies, that take care of the custody of the child and lodge them in child care homes. There is absolutely no accountability to our government or our government has no way of tracking these children,” Sujata said.

And in such cases, the child is doubly affected, Sujata argues, especially if the child is one with special needs.

Although CARA has a follow-up mechanism in its guidelines, it is seldom followed, she pointed out.

“We are not able to track children in our own country. Say the child is adopted in India itself and if at a later time the child is not wanted, at least the child is in the country. That’s not the case with international adoptions. Why should an Indian child be given up for adoption to parents from abroad? We are not anti-adoption, but there is no reason why our government should give kids abroad. The follow-ups are extremely difficult, no matter what guidelines are in place,” Sujata said.
Like Sujatha, Anjali Pawar, an activist with Sakhi, who works against child trafficking, believes that it is time for a complete revamp of international adoption procedures.

“Who is writing these follow-up reports? How much can foreign adoption agencies follow up on such cases?” she asked.

Although there are quite a larger number of cases where the adopted child is returned or deported, CARA is hiding the actual number, she alleged.

“CARA has done nothing in Sherin missing case, they have been mum about the child. We wrote to Maneka Gandhi and other ministers, but received no response. Foreign adoption must be the last option that CARA should be looking at,” Anjali said.

Commenting on the lack of comprehensive follow up by CARA, child rights activist Nina Naik said that the authority needs to formulate some kind of a mechanism to consistently follow up adoption cases.

“CARA needs to device some of mechanism by which, they can seek progress report of the adopted child at least once a year, until the child attains the age of 18. The foreign adoption agencies give mandatory post-placement support to the child, but what do such visits by social workers entail?” she said.

When it comes to adoption of children with special needs, Nina said that couples who have parenting experience and who understand the child’s issues are generally made eligible to adopt them.

SANYA DHINGRA 25 October, 2017

US adoption agency could be punished for Sherin Mathews death
Three-year-old Sherin Mathews was found dead in Texas | Source: Facebook/WhereIsSherin
CARA head says Holt International could be derecognised if lapses are found in its follow-up reports on three-year-old, Sherin Mathews, found dead in Texas.

New Delhi: The head of the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) said Wednesday that India will derecognise US adoption agency Holt International if it finds any lapses in its follow-up reports on three-year-old Sherin Mathews, who was found dead in mysterious circumstances in Texas.

Holt International is an authorised foreign adoption agency (AFAA), which carried out the mandatory pre-adoption home study and the post-adoption follow-ups in the case of the girl, who was adopted from Gaya, Bihar.

“We had received positive recommendations (about the family), which is why we allowed the adoption in the first place,” CARA CEO Deepak Kumar told ThePrint.

“The agencies in the US are extremely efficient with regard to their checks,” Kumar said, but added that it is difficult to always be 100 per cent sure. “They (Holt International) will be sharing their investigation report, and if we find a lapse, we will derecognise them.”

Sherin’s father Wesley Mathews has claimed that she choked while drinking milk, and that he removed her body from the house as he “believed she had died”. His testimony has come under sharp criticism for its glaring loopholes, with residents in the neighbourhood in Dallas alleging foul play.

Wesley, who has been re-arrested and charged with first-degree felony injury to a child due to a conflicting statement to the police, had earlier claimed that he had punished Sherin by putting her under a tree at 3 am for not drinking milk.

The response of the Indian government and CARA, which is mandated to monitor and regulate in-country and inter-country adoptions, has so far been cautious.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development organised a review meeting on the ‘Implementation of Adoption Programme by the States & Union Territories: Challenges & Way Forward’ Tuesday, but made no mention of Sherin’s case in its public statements.

#ASIAOCTOBER 26, 2017 / 2:03 PM / UPDATED 7 HOURS AGO

Rina Chandran
3 MIN READ
MUMBAI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The death in Texas of a three-year-old girl adopted from India a year ago has prompted renewed calls for an end to international adoptions, which campaigners say put vulnerable children at risk of abuse.

The girl’s adoptive father, Wesley Mathews, was charged on Monday with injury to a child, a first-degree felony that carries a maximum punishment of 99 years in prison, Texas police said.

The body of Sherin, who was born in India, was found in a culvert under a road. Mathews has admitted to moving her body from the family’s home in Richardson, Texas.

The toddler’s death has attracted wide coverage in India, where campaigners called for an immediate end to intercountry adoptions, which they say fail to protect children.

“Intercountry adoptions have become a lucrative market where children are effectively sold,” said activist Sujata Mody.

“It is a fallacy that these children are better off abroad; we should stop intercountry adoptions immediately,” said Mody, who has studied adoption agencies in India.

ADVERTISING

India’s top court last year ordered the government to draw up strict guidelines for screening and tracking adoptions after a charity alleged the existence of rackets involving both Indian and foreign adoption agencies.

In the 1970s, when there was no law in India to regulate adoptions, thousands of children were given away in intercountry adoptions.

The government began to regulate adoptions after a Supreme Court judgment in 1984, and became a signatory to the Hague convention on intercountry adoption in 2003.

It has since followed the guidelines “diligently” to prevent any abuse, according to the head of the government’s Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA).

“This was an aberration; the conditions now are very stringent, particularly for intercountry adoptions,” said Deepak Kumar, CARA’s chief executive.

Sherin was a special-needs child, and the credentials of the adoptive parents were thoroughly checked by the U.S. adoption agency, Kumar said.

The agency carried out follow-up visits after she arrived in the United States in 2016 as mandated, and sent detailed reports, he said.

“There was nothing that was out of the ordinary or a cause for alarm,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

There were about 4,000 adoptions in India in the year to March 2017; nearly 600 were intercountry adoptions, data showed.

India has no way of ensuring the safety of a child in a foreign country, said Arun Dohle, director of advocacy group Against Child Trafficking.

“It is much better to help children where they are, and end intercountry adoption,” said Dohle, who was adopted from India as a child by a German family.

“The death of this child is proof the system does not work.”

Reporting by Rina Chandran @rinachandran, Editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.

WFAA is traveling to find out more about Sherin Mathews’ life in India.
Author:
Alisha Ebrahimji
Published:
3:06 PM CDT November 2, 2017

It’s been one week since 3-year-old Sherin Mathews’ body was found in a culvert not far from her Richardson home. Sherin’s adoptive father, Wesley Mathews, admitted to removing the child’s body and faces a felony injury to a child charge.

A cause of death is still pending for the child, and many questions still surround the investigation.

Sherin’s body was released from the medical examiner’s office over the weekend and taken to a funeral home, but there are no details on funeral arrangements or how she will be honored.

Sherin was adopted from an orphanage in Nalanda, a city in the eastern state of India’s Bihar in 2016. Sherin lived in the orphanage since she was an infant. At the time she was named Saraswati.

WFAA has sent a team of journalists to India to learn more about Sherin’s life as Saraswati, before she was adopted and brought to Dallas as Sherin.Starting Wednesday, this article will detail the team’s entire journey.

RAW: What we’re finding about Sherin Mathews’ life in India

Wednesday 11/1/17: Nalanda, India

We set out bright and early on a mission to make it to the city of Nalanda. Nalanda is a city inside the state of Bihar and is about 67 kilometers which ended up being a two hour road trip for the team.

On the way to Nalanda, we called Babita Kumari, Sherin’s caretaker at the orphanage and told her we were on our way to the area.

She hasn’t appeared on camera for any interviews about Sherin so we were grateful for the opportunity to interview her inside her home.

Babita Kumari’s home in Nalanda.
Sherin was abandoned in the area and was found at a young age by India’s equivalency of a Salvation Army worker. She was then brought to Kumari’s adoption agency or in other words, an ashram.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in was the photo hanging on Kumari’s wall directly facing her desk…it was a photo of baby Sherin with a beaded garland wrapped around it. In the Hindu religion, as a sign of respect and as a way to honor someone, a garland is placed on a photo of a loved one once they have passed away.

A photo from Babita Kumari’s home office of Sherin Mathews as a young child.
Kumari explained that the children she used to take care of at her adoption agency never knew a real mother or father. This was especially true for Sherin — she used to call Kumari “mumma.”

She says it was very difficult for her to let Sherin leave with her new adoptive parents, Sini and Wesley Mathews but at the time she thought it was for the best. Kumari talked about how sending her to America meant better opportunities for her and a chance to be provided for better than she was in India.

We showed photos of Sherin throughout her short life to Kumari and asked her what emotions she had as she looked at them. All she could say was that looking at the progression of photos taken at various points in her life, Kumari said she sensed a “pattern of sadness” on Sherin’s face.

Babita Kumari, ashram caretaker for Sherin Mathews before she was adopted and taken to Dallas.
Kumari expressed her interest in speaking with Wesley Mathews, Sherin’s adoptive father. She said if given the opportunity she would probably end up slapping him.

“This could have been avoided, she said. “Saraswati [Sherin] should have been alive.”

After visiting Kumari in her village, we went to see the ashram where Sherin lived. The top two floors of the building were used for the ashram’s purpose but now it’s completely residential.

Former ashram (adoption agency) where Sherin Mathews lived before her adoption to Dallas.
He showed us where Sherin and the other children used to play and said he always supported Kumari and applauded her for the work she did for the children.

Naman Mishra, a journalist with News Bihar has been accompanying us throughout our time in India. Mishra says though what happened to Sherin is tragic, the community in Bihar has not showed the same outcry that community members in Dallas and throughout the nation have.

On Thursday we plan on finding an answer to the question, “What now?” What happens to the adoption process and relations between the United States and India. Kumari says things will definitely change, but how? We’re going to talk to a teacher at a local orphanage and leaders in the community about how things will change.

Thursday 11/2/17: Patna, India

We started our day a little later today. We didn’t have to drive far to get the interviews we needed so we stayed in the city of Patna.

We started our day at Dr. Ashok Choudary, former president of Bihar Congress and Bihar Minister of Education’s compound.

The pond at lawmaker, Dr. Ashok Choudary’s home in Patna.
Choudary spoke about his work in education and his current role in the upcoming legislative session. On Nov. 27, all 74 members of the legislative body will gather to discuss new action items. He says he will definitely be speaking about India’s adoption process there.

“It doesn’t matter what caste, religion or race someone is,” Choudary said. “This shouldn’t happen to anyone.”

Dr. Ashok Choudary, former education minister of Bihar, legislator
We asked him what he thinks will happen to the adoption process in India and his solution is to buckle down on the adoption screening process.

“I think the [prospective] parents should stay in the city where the child is before adoption so they can really get to know the child and make sure it’s a good fit” Choudary said.

His facial expresses changed from concerned to disturbed when we asked what he thought about Sherin Mathews in particular.

“It’s pathetic…really pathetic that we failed her not once, but twice,” he said.

For Choudary, even though he didn’t ever meet Sherin personally, he will always see her as Saraswati. This is in large part due to the media coverage in India consistently calling her by that name and that it connects her to her Bihari roots.

We asked Choudary about something we discussed on Facebook Live Wednesday and that’s about the stigma surrounding the South Asian community about adopting and couple’s who decide to adopt.

Choudary said maybe the pressure of this stigma and difficulties they say they’ve had with her in combination contributed to the Mathew’s being unable to care for Saraswati.

He said, “if you see 25 years before, the situation has changed” and people have changed their opinions and views in India.

Following Choudary’s interview we traveled 20 minutes down the road to a night school in the slums ran by a former politician, Rishikesh Singh.

Left: Naman Mishra, Bihar News Right: Rishikesh Singh, social worker and educator.
Singh left politics to become a social worker and opened up two schools for children in one of poorest parts of town. The one we visited was called Gyanshala.

He expressed his sadness for the events that happened with Sherin and wishes that her biological parents knew they had options in caring for her instead of abandoning her.

Singh’s purpose for holding free night classes is to educate the at-risk youth in the slums and show their parents that they are capable of a quality education.

Classes are seven days a week from 3 p.m. – 6 p.m. A third school is currently in the works and scheduled to open on India’s next Children’s Day on Nov. 14.

Rishikesh Singh with his students at his evening school in Patna.
“I feel very sad,” Singh said. “Parents shouldn’t abandon their children no matter how poor they are.”

His advice for adjusting the adoption process was more transparency across the board. More communication and screening between the governing body, the Indian child and the adoption agency.

“The government and adoption agency should never lose touch with the child,” he suggested.

Singh also said there should be some sort of plan to track their health and wellness. Even if they don’t have any issues while they’re in the adoption agency’s custody, that doesn’t mean that after they’ve moved on they won’t develop them later in life.

On the other hand, we spoke with Arun Dohle with an organization called “Against Child Trafficking” who says intercontinental adoptions must come to a hault.

“American parents should take care of American children and Indian is able to take care of its own children,” he said. “It should just be stopped.”

Dohle said he doesn’t like the violation of children’s rights and very little resources are being established to administer proper care in India.

“The point is that the Indian government has no way of following up with what happens to US children,” he said.

At that point Dhole said essentially the entire Indian country has abandoned the child.

With details continuing to evolve in Sherin Mathews’ death, you can count on WFAA and our team to stay on top of any and all updates. Thank you for taking this journey with us and we hope we’ll have more answers soon.

Have a question or want to take a look back on the journey through social? Tweet the team: @alishaebrahimji, @jobinpnews and @brandonmowry — or follow @wfaa8 on Instagram.

Remember ACT’s Adoption Lobby Alert from 2015 “Adoption Lobby Alert: RIP CHIFF, Hello Global Alliance for Children!“?

Well, here’s an update. This morning we received the below mail, informing us of the closure of operations.

This comes as quite a surprise, since Kathleen Strottman , Executive Director , Global Alliance for Children was recently still going strong at the launch of the Both End Believing’s Conference (former Both Ends Burning). You can watch the video here

Kathleen Strottman was previously the Executive Director of CCAI, the non-profit partner to the largest bicameral caucus in Congress – and former right-hand of pro-adoption champion Mary Landrieu. This Global Alliance, made up by some big  names like Lumos’ Georgette Mulheir, Unicef’s Cornelius Williams, former Holt’s Dan Lauer, could apparently not achieve their desired results:

From: “Philip Goldman” <pgoldman@maestral.org>
Date: 17 Nov 2017 18:26
Subject: Global Alliance for Children: closure of operations
To: “Philip Goldman” <pgoldman@maestral.org>
Cc: “Kathleen Strottman” <kathleen@globalallianceforchildren.org>

Dear friend of the Global Alliance for Children,

As Chair of the Board, I am writing the share the news that the Global Alliance for Children (“GAC”) will be ceasing operations.  Our Executive Director, Kathleen Strottman, will end her work with the Alliance on December 31, 2017, and GAC will continue to wind down or transfer its projects for a short period after that.

GAC was created in 2013 by a group of multilaterals, bilaterals, NGOs, experts and funders interested in developing a cross-cutting and innovative platform for meeting the needs of children in adversity around the globe.  GAC aimed to provide a global platform for responses to issues of early childhood development, ensuring family care for all and preventing violence against children.  The overall objective was to support governments and other stakeholders in adopting a holistic approach in their policies, programs and services addressing children’s needs and vulnerabilities.

Since then, GAC has been an active supporter and participant in global convenings, including an important recent data summit, where it has worked to advocate around this message.  GAC also participated in the founding, development and implementation of Cambodia’s ongoing Family Care First program.  GAC has developed a significant public-private partnership for that program, and supported and facilitated emerging research efforts for children outside of family care.

Still, progress has proved challenging.  Other important global alliances and networks have overlapping mandates with GAC’s mission, and bilateral funding has been challenging to secure in the current environment.  This has made it difficult to develop the necessary capacity to operate effectively at both the global and national levels.  Further, GAC’s approaches to collective impact have proven challenging to operationalize on the ground.

The Board has reviewed these challenges, and has decided the next logical step is to wind down its operations.  However, the current members of GAC’s Board intend to continue their collaboration as an informal consultative group, meeting annually to discuss their individual and collective efforts to pursue their objectives of securing more integrated and holistic approaches to the needs of children in adversity.

I assure you that the Board and staff are working diligently to ensure an orderly wind down of operations, and to transfer GAC’s current projects in the field to other organizations.

We thank the many individuals, funders and organizations that collaborated on GAC’s mission and provided it with resources, that partnered in its programming, and that served as staff or members of the Board.  While we are disappointed in this outcome, we remain optimistic that we all, collectively, can still work together to make this a better world for children.

Please feel free to contact Kathleen if you have any specific questions.

With my appreciation,

Philip Goldman

Chair

Global Alliance for Children

Philip Goldman
President

Email: pgoldman@maestral.org

Tel: 612-354-3085

www.maestral.org

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

150 South 5th Street, Suite 2850, Minneapolis, MN 55402 USA

The Dutch Parliament will discuss the advisory report “Reflections on Intercountry Adoptions” on 13 December 2017.

With courtesy to United Adoptees International!

See here the letter UAI and other adoptee organisations sent to the Dutch Parliament. We all support the findings of the advisory report that intercountry adoptions need to stop, but not just that.

So I made a doc series on international trafficking network that circumnavigated the globe, a criminal network in which we are all culpable. @jginorton and the #McMafia team capture the hedonistic nature, the ubiquitous presence & malign effects of the black market beautifully.

— Nelufar Hedayat (@nelufar) January 8, 2018

WATCH THE TRAFFICKERS

Just watched #McMafia? Characters like @jginorton's Alex Godman crop up in many of our investigations. @Ava_L_ explains: pic.twitter.com/fETgTRygDz

— Global Witness (@Global_Witness) January 7, 2018

By Joshua Philipp, The Epoch Times
March 15, 2018 10:09 am Last Updated: March 28, 2018 3:20 pm

Two displaced Iraqi sisters from Mosul, play at an orphanage in Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, on April 30, 2017. (SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty Images)
ShareTweetShareEmail
Global adoption is a big business, fraught with loose regulations and profit incentives that have made it a target for kidnappers, human traffickers, and pedophiles.

Despite regulations on international adoptions, and with some countries even banning all foreign adoptions, the problem has continued. Kidnappers continue to fuel the trade, and adoption agencies continue to skirt the laws.

“What I stumbled on was horrific,” said Ed Opperman, a private investigator and host of “The Opperman Report” radio show.

Opperman began investigating cases of parents trying to locate their real children and of kids looking for their real parents. In some countries, “there’s no vetting whatsoever,” he said. “There is money to be made in this adoption business.”

It’s out there. They’re exploited for child labor, for sex, you name it.
— Peter Gleason, lawyer and former NYPD police officer
“You can go to Thailand and countries in Africa and just pick up a kid, and come back to America with no paperwork,” he said. Even Russia, which has acted to crack down on international adoptions, has only minimal red tape that includes a test, a background check, and a waiting period.

In July 2014, a new U.S. law went into effect that required federal review and accreditation of all U.S. adoption agencies. The Intercountry Adoption Universal Accreditation Act of 2012 was passed amid widespread reports that kidnappers were selling children to foreign orphanages, sometimes with the cooperation of what appeared to be legitimate humanitarian groups.

Guatemala banned international adoptions in 2007, at a time when close to 1 out of every 100 children born in the country were being adopted by foreign parents. In 2011, investigative journalist and author Erin Siegal McIntrye obtained memos from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala that showed children were being kidnapped for the industry, and that mothers were being threatened with death for attempting to locate their children.

After the foreign adoption industry in Guatemala was shut down, and after Guatemala adopted international standards on foreign adoptions under the Hague Abduction Convention, the international adoption market went elsewhere and the local criminals looked for new streams of revenue. However, the abuse of adoptions didn’t end. InSight Crime reported in 2013 that in Guatemala, “illegal adoptions continue to flourish despite regulations,” and that “the majority of stolen babies are sold for irregular adoptions or for their organs.”

A 15-year-old displaced Iraqi girl from Mosul speaks to an employee of her orphanage in northern Iraq on April 30, 2017. (SAFIN HAMED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Ongoing Abuse
While the 2014 U.S. law ended the “wild west” state of the international adoption business in the United States, which had been mostly untouched by federal regulation and oversight, the law did little to solve the problem.

In 2016, Uganda tightened its foreign adoption laws, according to Reuters, to restrict “fast-track foreign adoptions” in which children with living parents could be kidnapped under the guise of adoption in just days. Reuters stated that hundreds of children were taken from Uganda, mainly to the United States.

In India, children up for adoption have been referred to as “manufactured orphans.” India’s Firstpost news outlet reported that in 2016, a “kidnap-for-adoption” racket was uncovered in Kolkata, where an adoption agency was found guilty of stealing infants from “impoverished unwed mothers, rape survivors, and marginalized families.”

It stated, “In many cases, healthy babies were substituted with stillborns and the mothers were told their babies had died. Sometimes, poor parents were made to sign documents which they did not comprehend. They thought they were admitting their children to a free residential school but actually ended up giving up all rights over them.”

In 2017, police in India arrested the heads of an adoption center that was selling children to foreign couples for between $12,000 and $23,000 per child.

The problem has continued even in the United States. In 2017, the FBI raided the agency European Adoption Consultants in Ohio, where news outlet WKYC reported allegations that the enterprise failed to adequately supervise adoptions for “preventing the sale, abduction, exploitation, or trafficking of children.” European Adoption Consultants was also reported to have failed to prevent the “solicitation of bribes” and to have fraudulently obtained birth parent consent.

The company operated in Bulgaria, China, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, India, Poland, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ukraine.

According to Peter Gleason, a lawyer and former police officer in the New York Police Department, the problem of child trafficking through adoption agencies is well-known. “It’s out there,” he said. “They’re exploited for child labor, for sex, you name it.”

Exploiting Disaster
Human traffickers also take advantage of natural disasters. Australia’s ABC News reported that in the wake of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, “trafficking networks were springing into action immediately after the disaster and taking advantage of the weakness of local authorities and relief coordination” to kidnap children.

This issue hit the headlines when Laura Silsby, the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge, was arrested with nine other American nationals for trying to bring 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic without documentation.

There is money to be made in this adoption business.
— Ed Opperman, private investigator and radio show host
Silsby initially claimed the children were orphaned or abandoned, but the Haitian government and the charity SOS Children’s Villages found this wasn’t true; none of the children were orphans, as all had at least one living parent. Silsby’s legal adviser, Jorge Puello, was also detained in an alleged human trafficking ring accused of bringing women and children from Central America and Haiti.

Former President Bill Clinton, who was then coordinating relief efforts in Haiti, intervened to have all co-conspirators in the case released, except Silby. Yet prosecutors reduced her charges from conspiracy and child abduction to “arranging irregular travel.”

‘Re-homing’ of Children
Among the other ongoing issues, according to Opperman, is that of “re-homing,” in which people can adopt children, then pass the children to new parents with almost no regulation.

“There’s a whole network, there are message boards, there are Yahoo groups of all these people who’ve got these kids. They don’t want them anymore, and they re-home them,” Opperman said.

He said child advertisements can include statements of pre-teen children being “sexually aggressive,” having problems with substance abuse, or being “very eager to please.”

“There’s no paperwork. What they do is they give you a power of attorney, that ‘here, you can enroll my kid in school, you can take him to the doctor,’ and that’s it. The kid’s gone,” he said. “And there are documented cases where these kids, they wound up with pedophiles.”

After they’re in the United States and handed off to less regulated forms of adoption, the children are more likely to face abuse.

Geoffrey Rogers, CEO of the U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking, said that “approximately 60 to 70 percent of kids that are trafficked in the United States come out of the foster care system.”

Approximately 60 to 70 percent of kids that are trafficked in the United States come out of the foster care system.
— Geoffrey Rogers, CEO, U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking
According to a 2015 report from the Arkansas Journal of Social Change and Public Service, “re-homing is not regulated; there’s no legal framework to address it,” and it’s “mostly an underground affair.”

The report notes the majority of children who fall victim to re-homing are adopted from abroad. It says close to 73 percent are advertised as adopted from overseas, and only around 7 percent are advertised as not from overseas. Ten to 20 percent of adoptions fail.

With domestic adoptions, there are processes and procedures for the rights of birth mothers, for future adoptive parents, and for the welfare of the children. The report states, “These safeguards are often absent when parents adopt children from overseas.”

“This is because children born in U.S. hospitals or to U.S. citizens benefit from reliable documentation that is often absent in international adoptions, which creates a greater risk of unethical conduct than in domestic adoptions,” the report states.

Opperman noted that the situation for children adopted from overseas also differs heavily across states. Among the states with the weakest regulations, he said, is Utah, and he noted that some adoption agencies will choose to establish their office in the states with weak oversight. “There are a couple states where it’s just a free for all—you can do whatever you want. Even if the adoption goes through in Florida or New York, they’ll do the paperwork out of Utah.”

Opperman said, “There’s really no vetting done with these private adoptions whatsoever. Once they take place, nobody knows where these kids went.”

By Janene Pieters on March 28, 2018 – 07:38

Adopted children from Sri Lanka and Indonesia filed a lawsuit against the Dutch government over errors in their adoption procedures in the 1980’s. They want the government to compensate the high costs they’re incurring in the search for their origin and biological parents, according to a Zembla broadcast on Wednesday, NU.nl reports.

Last year Zembla reported that adoption files of children from Sri Lanka and Indonesia, among others, were falsified on a large scale and that biological parents did not always give their child up voluntarily.

According to the lawyers representing the adopted kids, the Dutch state is responsible for making sure that adoption procedures from abroad are correctly implemented. Because the state failed to do so, adoption files could be falsified. The government can therefore be held liable, the lawyers said. Now these adopted children have no idea what their real identity is or who their biological parents are, and have to incur high costs in their search to find out.

“Crimes have been committed. It is actually bizarre, that if you are adopted and there are counterfeit papers, you have to solve your own crime and that you have to pay for it”, lawyer Dewi Deijle, who was adopted from Indonesia, said in the program.

According to emeritus professor on adoption Rene Hoksbergen, the government failed in its supervisory task here. “Were al those children really adoptable? Were those children not almost sold? There should have been supervision. That was missing”, he said to Zembla. The government must help as many of the 40 thousand affected children as possible to fix the inaccuracies of the past, he said.

Former VVD parliamentarian Ed Nijpels also spoke in the broadcast. He insisted that legislation be implemented on adoptions from abroad in the 1980’s already. He then told the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch parliament, that “importing peanuts is subject to more regulations than the adoption of a foreign child”.

Zembla asked the Ministry of Justice and Security for a response. “Everyone is free to go to court”, the Ministry said in a written response, according to the program.

Sneha Agrawal
New Delhi
March 31, 2018

Matilda was adopted by a Swedish couple form Delhi orphanage when she was 7.
She received abuse and negligence from her parents in Sweden.
After staying in foster care, she is back in India to find her real parents.

Matilda Gustafsson, who was adopted by a Swedish couple when she was seven years old, has returned to India to find her biological parents. Matilda says her adoptive parents turned abusive and she was shifted to a foster home.
Matilda Gustafsson, named Shobha at birth, was given up for adoption at the age of seven to a childless Swedish couple by a Delhi orphanage. But Matilda’s joy of being part of a family was cut short once her parents turned abusive and negligent. She was once again forced to live in foster care.

Having gone through a traumatic experience, Matilda, now all of 23, has decided to trace back her adoption journey in India and find her biological parents. She, along with Arun Dohle and Anjali Pawar from Against Child Trafficking (ACT), has set out on a journey to find her roots and how she landed at the orphanage home.

During her stay in Delhi, she recalled playing with fountain at India Gate and eating bhelpuri and paan. She has vague memories of shining people’s shoes on the streets. Anjali Pawar told MAIL TODAY that Matilda was brought to the orphanage home by Madangir Police Station in 1999.

No record found

“Matilda’s adoption documents do not speak of her past or biological parents. There is no record of the circumstances in which she was found. Her records are not available with the police. We do not know if she was abandoned by her parents or went missing,” she said.

Matilda’s case highlights the lapses in the inter-country adoption system just in the case of three-year-old Sherin Matthew, who was adopted by a couple in Texas from India but was found dead two weeks after she was reported missing.

Her adoptive parents have been indicted by the court for her murder and for being negligent towards her. The experts feel that children who may have gone missing are also sometimes given up for adoption when the parents of the missing child may still be looking for him/her.

“I remember being excited when the orphanage caretaker told me I will have my own family. My adoptive parents sent me gifts frequently. But things changed three years after moving to Sweden,” Matilda told MAIL TODAY. “My mother was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and tried to take her life twice. With her failing health, my father grew distant. He also had temperament issues. I started performing poorly in school. I was diagnosed with dyslexia and never received the right help. My father was extremely abusive towards my mother. Even at school, I was bullied and made fun of for my colour,” she added.

A childhood picture of Matilda Gustafsson
Matilda mostly lived on noodles as there was no one to make food and felt that her parents did not like her. As years passed, her situation left her school worried. They facilitated her meeting with a social worker who suggested that she be put in a foster care home.

“When I told my father I want to go to a foster care, he did not say anything. I am glad to have found a good foster home,” she said.

Long way to go

Biometric registration of missing children and orphans is one way suggested by experts to keep a track of their whereabouts. Sherin’s case has thickened India’s intercountry adoption process but the child rights activists believe that there is long way to go.

Speaking to MAIL TODAY, Anant Kumar Asthana, advocate and child rights activist, said, “Once children go out of Indian jurisdiction in inter-country adoptions, they lose their agency and there is nothing India can do for them if they meet an undesired fate. Many who come back after becoming adults in search of their biological parents often find the system not cooperative enough.”

“Government should improve international cooperation on inter-country child adoption to ensure that rights of such children are kept intact and they do not land without a support system. Secondly, the focus should be on preserving records of the children given into adoption for at least 60 years. Most often no records of such children are found when they come back to search for their families,” Asthana said.

Statement
Cambodia’s Stolen Children: Fraud and Corruption in the Inter-Country Adoption System
Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO)

Enlarge this picture
March 30, 2018 – Thousands of Cambodian children were adopted overseas between the late 1980s and 2009. During that time it emerged that many of the adopted children were not orphans but had parents who placed them in orphanages because of extreme poverty. Their parents placed them there on the understanding that they would return home at a later date. They did not consent to their children’s adoption. Instead, orphanage directors, with the help of local authorities, created documents falsely stating that the children were orphans or had been abandoned.

When evidence of this came to light, many countries suspended the adoption of children from Cambodia and in 2009 Cambodia itself suspended them. The parents of the children adopted abroad were often illiterate and lacked awareness of their rights or of where to turn to for help and so were unable to find out what had happened to their children.

In a new report Cambodia’s Stolen Children: Fraud and Corruption in the Inter-Country Adoption System released today, LICADHO describes the cases of several birth mothers who recently approached the organisation seeking help finding their children who had been adopted overseas in the 2000s. The women were all extremely poor and had left their children (aged three to nine) in the care of orphanages. In two cases they did so in order that their children could go to school. In another, the child was very sick and needed constant care which the mother could not provide as she worked in a garment factory. In all the cases the women continued to visit their children regularly for as long as they remained in the orphanages. None of them gave their consent for their children to be adopted.

According to the government’s own figures, 3,696 Cambodian children were sent abroad before the 2009 suspension. Given Cambodia’s history of inter-country adoption, it is probable that the cases described in the report are not unusual and that many more families had similar experiences.

“These cases are tragic,” said LICADHO Director Naly Pilorge. “The birth families were cheated, adoptive parents were tricked and the children have been robbed of their true identities. They all deserve to know the truth of what happened, and those responsible for these hideous crimes should be held to account.”

Since the 2009 suspension on international adoptions, LICADHO has found no record of prosecutions for documented offences and little evidence of any serious investigation by Cambodian authorities. Birth families have received no redress and there has been no recognition of their loss or suffering. Nonetheless, the Cambodian government has indicated several times that it plans to lift the ban.

The mothers who have approached LICADHO understand that their children are not coming back. Their strongest desire is to know what happened to them and to hear how they are now. They would like to meet them again if the children want that. LICADHO has attempted to contact relevant authorities inside and outside Cambodia in relation to the children’s cases. Progress has been difficult and hampered by the lack of official procedures for addressing historic cases of fraudulent adoption either inside Cambodia or internationally.

“Governments of countries which received children from Cambodia for adoption have as much responsibility as the Cambodian government for righting the wrongs of the past,” said Pilorge. “We know that there are a lot of cases like this and all governments involved must provide a clear way for all parties to seek redress.”

The report calls on the Cambodian government and governments of receiving countries to issue an apology to everyone affected by historic fraudulent adoptions. They should also set up a system of investigation and redress for the Cambodian families of fraudulently adopted children, and establish mechanisms for the adopted children to research their backgrounds and establish contact with their birth families if they wish it.

Finally, the report urges the governments to ensure that no new inter-country adoptions take place until the above systems are in place and fail-safe measures are implemented to prevent a repeat of past abuses.

For more information please visit the website of LICADHO:

http://www.licadho-cambodia.org/pressrelease.php

5 May 2018

Source: VPRO

Adoption from abroad is increasingly being questioned. The research program Zembla recently paid attention to corruption in adoptions from Sri Lanka, and on television in April was the Dutch documentary drama ‘Exportbaby’, about corruption in adoptions from Uganda. Last year, the Council for Criminal Justice Application and Youth Protection advised to ban adoption from abroad.

One of the first to uncover corruption scandals was Roelie Post, an official at the European Commission in Brussels. In the late nineties she worked for the EC on the issue of children’s rights in Romania. They had to be resolved before Romania’s accession to the EU was possible.

Post was faced with opposition and threats that are so serious that she is now living in hiding in a village in the north of the Netherlands and that she has a long-standing conflict with her employer, the EC. It does not recognize her as a whistleblower and threatens with punitive measures.

Roelie Post tells her story in Argos.

===================================

Adoptie uit het buitenland staat steeds meer ter discussie. Het onderzoeksprogramma Zembla besteedde recent aandacht aan corruptie bij adopties uit Sri Lanka, en op de televisie was in april het Nederlandse docu-drama ‘Exportbaby’, over corruptie bij adopties uit Oeganda. Vorig jaar adviseerde de Raad voor Strafrechtstoepassing en Jeugdbescherming om adoptie uit het buitenland te verbieden.

Een van de eersten die corruptieschandalen aan het licht bracht was Roelie Post, ambtenaar bij de Europese Commissie in Brussel. Eind jaren negentig werkte zij voor de EC aan de problematiek van de kinderrechten in Roemenie. Die moesten opgelost voordat toetreding van Roemenie tot de EU mogelijk was.

Post kreeg te maken met tegenwerking en bedreigingen die zo ernstig zijn dat ze inmiddels ondergedoken leeft in een dorpje in het noorden van Nederland en dat ze een slepend conflict heeft met haar werkgever, de EC. Die erkent haar niet als klokkenluider en dreigt met strafmaatregelen.

In Argos vertelt Roelie Post haar verhaal.

Timmerfrans zegt ‘hup klokkenluiders’, gooit klokkenluider Roemeense adoptiemaffia voor bus https://t.co/ZR7xXjdqS6

— GeenStijl (@geenstijl) May 7, 2018

20 May 2018

Dear Members of Euradopt,

Since the late 1970s you have met regularly to discuss topics of common concern. This year on 24/25 May in Milan in cooperation with the European Parliament: The Adoption Dilemma.
May we, on behalf of the parents, suggest you discuss how to deal with the outstanding issue of solving these parents’ pain? And, of course, how to re-connect them to their children. Including apologies and financial compensation. For all parties involved.

Here some examples, we have many many more…

Adoptionscentrum Sweden – Board Euradopt

Manufactured Orphans

Believing she was ‘stolen’ and trafficked as an ‘orphan’, Jyothi Svahn goes on a multi-country hunt for her birth family – and uncovers an international adoption industry built on lies, greed and heartbreak.

With the help of ACT, a Swedish adoptee follows the criminal trail to India to unmask the deception behind her adoption story. ACT’s founder Roelie Post explains the pattern on Channel AsiaNews.

Amici dei Bambini AiBi – Italy

THE TRAFFICKERS – The Dark Side of Adoption

By Fusion | November 3, 2016

In this exclusive look at the first episode, Nelufar begins her journey in America, which adopts more children from overseas than all other countries in the world put together. But ominous forces lurk beneath many of these joyful unions.
ACT’s founders Roelie Post and Arun Dohle (on the background) guided Nelufar into the Dark Side of Adoption.
Available on Netflix US and UK.

The Whistleblower from The Netherlands… EU civil servant Roelie Post

Bambini rubati, chiesta ricusazione del Gip «Senza intercettazioni, ha già assolto Aibi»
DOCUMENTI / La Corte d’Appello dovrà ora decidere se il procedimento va affidato a un altro giudice. Il magistrato Sofia Fioretta non aveva concesso l’ascolto delle telefonate di Marco Griffini sostenendo l’assenza di indizi. I legali dei genitori adottivi chiedono di estendere l’inchiesta ad alcuni collaboratori dell’associazione, indicati dalla Procura di Roma quando ha trasmesso il fascicolo alla Direzione distrettuale antimafia di Milano. Le famiglie contestano anche i reati di riduzione in schiavitù dei minori e truffa aggravata.

Read here: BLOG FABRIZIO GATTI – L’ESPRESSO

CIAI Italy – Chair Euradopt

This Indian family spoke out in the documentary “Manufactured Orphans”. Their child is in Italy.

Danish International Adoption (DIA), Denmark – Board Euradopt
Amy
17 February 2014 – A 13 year old girl puts a bomb under the adoption system

English subtitles

2008 A Baby Business

Evangelischer Vereign für Adoption und Pflegekinderhilfe e.V. (EVAP) Germany

(Partner orphanage Gelgela exposed)

Der verlorene Sohn

Kind en Toekomst (Child and Future) Netherlands
Source:  KRO REPORTER

(translated from Dutch)

Political parties want to stop on adoption from Bulgaria

“Control is insufficient and rules are not always followed”

The PvdA, SP, D66 and Christian Union consider that the adoption of children from Bulgaria must stop until further research is done. The Parties shall notify this following the broadcast of Brandpunt Reporter of tonight, in which different stakeholders tell that the adoption procedures in Bulgaria are not always properly followed. Since 2010 more than 80 Bulgarian children came to the Netherlands.

Nobody involved in adoptions in Bulgaria, says to be able to check whether adoptions are governed by the rules. According to those involved, children go abroad while they have family in Bulgaria who wants to take care of them. This is not allowed by the Bulgarian and international adoption laws.

Meiling Netherlands

Indian parents file a police complaint in the Netherlands: kidnapping.
ACT helped these parents with practical and material things. We welcomed them in our homes and hearts.

Sourires d’Enfants-Larisa – Belgium

Source: LeVif
Pourquoi personne n’a pu éviter le drame des enfants volés du Congo
Soraya Ghali Journaliste au Vif/L’Express

Du Le Vif/L’Express du 10/05/18
Il y a pile un an, le quotidien flamand Het Laatste Nieuws révélait que trois enfants
congolais volés à leurs familles biologiques avaient été adoptés en Belgique. En
novembre, le parquet fédéral annonçait un quatrième cas. Le Vif/L’Express est
aujourd’hui en mesure d’affirmer qu’il y en a un cinquième. Au moins. Pourquoi
personne n’a pu éviter ces drames ? Alors que les signaux d’alerte avaient été
lancés.

Wereldkinderen (NICWO) Netherlands – Secretariat of Euradopt

Children for Sale – Ethiopia

Netherlands – Broadcast Brandpunt KRO – 9 January 2011

Source:  L’ESPRESSO
(Google translation)

With courtesy to Fabrizio Gatti, investigative journalist

The Municipality of Milan achieved to remove “Aibi-Amici dei Bambini” from the EurAdopt 2018 event, sponsored by the European Parliament, the Lombardy Region and the orders of psychologists and social workers. The agency is under investigation for criminal association, aiding illegal immigration, child abuse and corruption. On June 7 there is a new hearing, which is still in the preliminary phase.

The poster of the international conference EurAdopt 2018

The international conference on adoption of EuroAdopt 2018 children, which the city of Milan hosts from Thursday 24 May at Palazzo delle Stelline, begins with a slide. A formal protest on Tuesday evening from the municipal councillor for Social Policies, Pierfrancesco Majorino, transmitted personally by the mayor Giuseppe Sala, forced the organizers to cancel the presence of the NGO “Aibi – Amici dei bambini”, exponent of the European network “Euradopt.org”, Which was supposed to represent Italy on the inaugural day.
The president of Aibi, Marco Griffini, the managing director and wife of Griffini, Irene Bertuzzi and their daughter, Valentina Griffini, responsible for operations in Africa, are in fact investigated by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate of Milan for crimes of aggravated criminal association, aiding illegal immigration, corruption, child abuse and disclosure of confidential information.

The mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala

The investigation stems from dozens of complaints from Italian parents who, without their knowledge, through Aibi would have adopted children who could not be adopted, because they had never been abandoned by their natural families in the Democratic Republic of Congo or because the sentences of adoption issued by a Congolese Court would contain untrue statements. On June 7 the Milan Court of Appeals will decide on the rejection of the judge for preliminary investigations, Sofia Fioretta. The investigating judge Fioretta had denied wiretapping, believing that the evidence was insufficient. The rejection provision and the twenty-seven pages of motivations, however, according to the offended parties are equivalent to a sentence of acquittal decided prematurely by the magistrate, without there ever having been the possibility of carrying out investigations. An alleged violation of Article 37 of the Criminal Procedure Code, for which the parents now request that the judge be replaced.

The magistrate Ilda Boccassini

Deprived of the wiretapping tool the public prosecutors of the DDA, Paolo Storari and Giovanna Cavalleri, coordinated by the then deputy prosecutor Ilda Boccassini, had resigned themselves to request the archiving of the whole investigation, although in their deeds they had written: “The events above reconstructed, with reference to all the problems arising in the adoption procedures of the Congolese children, lead us to believe that the reported and ascertained irregularities may constitute the usual modus operandi of the association in managing, even in other countries, the identification of adoptable children, the separation of the same from the families of origin (where existing), as well as the subsequent matching and reunification with Italian couples “.

And again: «Also the circumstance that Aibi makes extensive use of the so-called exclusivity clauses with the individual reception centres or local orphanages (to the detriment of other Italian organisations) – by virtue of which a centre is obliged to report minors that can only be adopted through Aibi for consideration of donations of money for every successful procedure adopted – it can only raise more than a few suspicions: that behind these transfers of money we can hide not so much a contribution for the maintenance of the adopted minor, as stated in the agreement signed by Aibi with one of the Congolese centres, but rather the price of what could become a real trade of minors “. This is why the adoptive parents opposed the filing request. While the Griffins have always rejected the accusations.

The EuroAdopt 2018 conference, organized by the Italian association Ciai Onlus, received the patronage of the institutions: the European Parliament, the City of Milan, the Lombardy Region, as well as the Stelline Foundation, the National Union of Minor Chambers, the International Social Service, the Order of social workers and the Order of Psychologists.

The commissioner Pierfrancesco Majorino

The mayor Sala and the commissioner Majorino knew in the late afternoon of Tuesday that on the opening day Italy, the host country, would be represented by Aibi. A quick verification of the documents submitted by the organizers to request legal aid confirmed that, according to the Municipality, Ciai Onlus had never declared the presence of speakers of the association under investigation. “Obviously we do not intend to enter into the merits of the investigations or anticipate judgments,” explains Councilor Majorino, who at the conference will welcome into the city guests arrived from half the world: “But I think it’s wrong, at a time when the investigation is still open, to have invited Aibi. He was not pleased that the presence of Aibi had not been announced.”

The association of Marco Griffini had sent Enrica Dato, the lawyer in charge of Aibi’s legal department that is defending the owners of the agency from the investigations of the District Anti-Mafia Directorate. On Wednesday morning his name and that of Aibi were cancelled by the program. The result is that on the opening day nobody will represent Italy, given that even among dozens of Italian agencies that never ended up under investigation, Ciai Onlus and Euroadopt.org had thought only of the agency of Marco Griffini.

Until Tuesday evening the attorney of Aibi was on the list of speakers, a few lines before the juvenile magistrate Laura Laera, vice-president of the International Adoption Committee, the supervisory authority of the Council Presidency. A few hours before the protest of the City of Milan, we asked Laera if she did not consider it “unbecoming, for the image of the government to be represented and of the judiciary, to participate in the “XIII EurAdopt International Conference” in Milan, to which are invited and will participate, as an Italian representative of the same EurAdopt, an agency (AIBI) whose managers are still being investigated by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate of Milan for serious crimes. “The vice president of Cai, who is also the wife of the head of the Milan prosecutor’s office that is investigating Aibi and that on 14 February admitted Marco Griffini and his daughter under investigation at a coordination meeting of the Council Presidency, appears to have read the question sent by email. But she did not answer. Probably not even the adoption committee was informed by Ciai Onlus.

Now that the invitation to Aibi has been discovered, its removal was demanded by the Municipality which saves many participants from embarrassment. None of the other sponsoring bodies had noticed the presence of an NGO under investigation, among other things, for the facilitation of illegal immigration. Not even the Lombardy Region with a Northern League guide. Although the guest list had long been published on the Internet.

FIRST BET – Adoptions: illegal immigration and corruption
SECOND BET – Stolen children, the 44 complaints forgotten
THIRD BET – We children, threatened and beaten
FOURTH BET – Griffini becomes councilor of the government
QUINTA PUNTATA – Griffini calls, Palazzo Chigi answers