Kids bought from smugglers: father

by: Ainsley Pavey
From: The Courier-Mail
March 26, 2013 1:00AM

TWO children embroiled in an international adoption scandal are being relocated to Australia amid allegations they are part of a child smuggling racket.
The Family Court of Australia has cleared the way for the children to leave their Mediterranean island home, three years after their adoption by an Australian couple.

Justice Kirsty Macmillan revealed the toddlers had spent their lives “effectively stranded” on the island since the breakdown of their adoptive parents’ marriage in 2010.

The four-year relationship ended a day after the High Court of Greece legalised the adoption, which the adoptive father now claims was illegal. He has launched an appeal against the court ruling in Greece on the grounds his wife obtained the children through a “black market child smuggling scheme”. (more…)

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Foreign-run orphanage closed after reports of abuse, human trafficking

Sapa-AP | 25 March, 2013 14:47

Cambodian authorities said Monday they had shut a foreign-run orphanage that is suspected of beating its children and carrying out human trafficking.

Officials and a rights group said police in the capital, Phnom Penh, on Friday raided the unlicensed orphanage, called Love in Action, and rescued 21 children.

Gratianne Quade, a spokeswoman for SISHA, an anti-trafficking organization in Cambodia, said an Australian woman who ran the orphanage was not arrested in the Friday raid and her current whereabouts were not known.

Poverty compels many parents in Cambodia to send their children to orphanages. SISHA estimates that 70% of Cambodia’s 100 000 orphans actually have at least one parent.

Um Sophanara, an official at the Social Affairs Ministry, which oversees orphanages, confirmed the closure but declined to give details. A SISHA statement said the raid came after several groups of children had fled the orphanage recently and reported a variety of neglect and abuse problems to authorities. (more…)

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Overseas adoption racket: How children are sneaked out by the hundreds

by Danish Raza Feb 20, 2013

That afternoon is indelibly printed in Saddam’s memory. He and his two-year- old sister Jabeen were playing in an auto rickshaw parked near their home in Washermanpet area of north Chennai. A man, who Saddam remembers, as “tall, short haired with a limp in his right leg”, appeared on the driver’s seat. “Next moment, I recall, he was maneuvering the auto-rickshaw through the alleys.” As the vehicle slowed down at a speed breaker, the boy, then four years old, jumped out. Watching the vehicle going afar, helplessly, he shouted non-stop, “Someone save my sister.”

Jabeen never returned. That was November 1998.

Six years later, Chennai police arrested two men, Sheikh Dawood and Manoharan, suspecting their involvement in a child trafficking racket. During interrogation, they confessed to have sold children to Malaysian Social Service (MSS), an adoption agency in Tamil Nadu.

Hundreds of children are victims of the overseas adoption racket in India. AFP.
Jabeen, as police found in MSS records, was adopted by an Australian family in the year 2000. She was one of the 100 children MSS had given up for adoption overseas. With a new name, fabricated history and an obviously uncertain future, the children were handed over to adoptive parents in the West, the organisation told police.

On Tuesday, child rights activists and families who have lost their children to overseas adoption demanded a stay on inter-country adoption until a child protection mechanism was put in place. They underlined the dark side of inter-country adoption even as Central Adoption Recourse Agency (CARA), a body under the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development, is holding an international conference on adoption on February 19 and 20. (more…)

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Indian family in fight to repatriate stolen daughter

Date February 19,  2013

ON the right hand side are the parents Fatima and Salya attend the High Court in India in 2010 as part of their struggle to get access to their daughter.

Fatima (left) and Salya attend the High Court in India in 2010.

AN INDIAN mother, whose child was kidnapped and illegally adopted to  Australia, has accused the country’s officials and the girl’s adoptive parents  of blocking the now teenager from having contact with her and of making no  effort to try and repatriate the girl. (more…)

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Laos probes sale of babies to Australians

by: From correspondents in Hanoi
From: AFP
February 06, 20127:55PM

LAOS is investigating a retired justice ministry official for allegedly selling adopted babies to Australians, Americans and Canadians for thousands of dollars each.

The official is accused of seeking out unwanted babies in poor rural areas, obtaining adoption papers and selling the infants to foreigners for up to $5,000 each, according to a Radio Free Asia report today. (more…)

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Adoption case raises fears over trafficking

Source: http://www.smh.com.au Geesche Jacobsen
August 30, 2011
A FOUR-year old girl who had been informally given to a Sydney couple under a traditional Samoan adoption arrangement should return to her parents in Samoa, the Family Court has ruled.

The girl known as ”S” had been promised to a childless great aunt and her husband before birth, but had lived with her parents and seven siblings in Samoa until she was nearly two years old.

Within days of delivering S to the couple in western Sydney in February 2009, the girl’s mother decided she wanted to keep the child. But before she could leave Australia, the couple – known in court as Mr and Ms Tomas – had filed proceedings which stopped S from leaving.

Two years later, the court has ruled that it would be best for S – a happy and healthy child who related to both sets of parents – to return to Samoa. (more…)

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Profit, not care: The ugly side of overseas adoptions

Date: 2011-06-05

Lax regulation and an endless demand by childless couples in the West has created an often exploitative market in babies born in the developing world

By Laurie Penny
Sunday, 5 June 2011

In rural Nepal, where the going rate for a healthy orphan is $5,000 (£3,000), some 600 children are missing. They were taken by agents who came to the villages promising that they would educate the children and give them a better life in the capital, sometimes for a steep fee. The children never returned. (more…)

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China’s government trafficking babies from poor families

Date: 2011-05-15
Source: http://www.youtube.com

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CBI files chargesheet in Preet Mandir case

It contains names of 114 witnesses, 168 documents against accused

Vijay Chavan
Posted On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 at 06:03:07 AM

The Special Crime Branch of the CBI on Tuesday filed an 87-page chargesheet against six accused including trustees of Preet Mandir and then chairman of Child Adoption Resource Agency (CARA) for their alleged involvement in illegal child procurement racket and extorting money from the parents. (more…)

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Senate calls inquiry into forced adoptions

Posted Mon Nov 15, 2010 9:30pm AEDT

The Senate is to inquire into the Commonwealth’s role in the forced adoption policies from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert has won support of the Senate for the issue to be considered by the Community Affairs References Committee. (more…)

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