February 16, 2012 DC Hyderabad a a a ShareAdd To My Pages email print
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In what seems to amount to a violation of the rules, orphan girls from Teresa’s Tender Loving Care Home (TLCH), Erragadda, are being sent for cross-country adoption though the home does not have a valid licence to operate. A court case is also pending against the institution, which has violated rules of the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA).

CARA says that as per court orders, TLCH is not allowed to send children for cross-country adoption. It has not even renewed its licence. Other children’s NGOs allege that orphans in some institutions are being trafficked in the name of inter-country adoption. About a decade ago, TLCH lost its case in the family court, the AP High Court and the Supreme Court regarding falsification and fabrication of documents pertaining to adoption. Its licence was revoked in 2001.

The adoption centre admits that the formalities for adoption of four children by foreign couples is going ahead and being processed through the State Home, which comes under the aegis of the women and child welfare department. One of the four girls is aged 11 and is to be adopted by a 60-year-old Spanish citizen, Ruiz Garcia. “Mr Garcia is secretary to the Council, a well-respected politician and has adopted a girl before. We give children for adoption only after checking the credentials of all prospective parents,” said Sister Teresa Maria, who is the coordinator of the adoption institution.

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.

He has been taken in for questioning.

Laos has suspended foreign adoptions pending the outcome of the investigation.

“Adopting a child for sale… is a crime related to human trafficking, no question about it,” a government official told the radio station.

The justice ministry is probing how the scam worked, including whether the birth parents sold their infants, which can constitute a human trafficking offence punishable by a three-to-five-year jail term, the official said.

It was not clear how many children were involved in the alleged adoption ring.

The retired official was “familiar” with most of the justice ministry’s employees and had often applied for adoption and naturalisation papers, the report said.

Laos is listed as Tier Two – out of three – in the US State Department’s 2011 anti human trafficking report, which praises the government’s “significant efforts” to combat the problem.

The US, however, said the government had “never administratively or criminally punished any public official for complicity in trafficking in persons”.

CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor

Mon, Jan 30, 2012

THERE IS as yet no evidence that uncompleted adoptions from Mexico will be affected by recent events in the country in which 11 Irish couples have been questioned in connection with illegal adoptions, according to the chairman of the Adoption Authority.

Geoffrey Shannon told The Irish Times there was ongoing contact with Mexican authorities in relation to 18 adoptions currently in train from Mexico, but stressed this was routine under the Hague Convention on intercountry adoption, to which both Ireland and Mexico are signatories.

“There is co-operation in relation to a number of adoptions that are outstanding,” he said. “This is normal under the Hague process.”

Since the incorporation of the convention into Irish law, the entire process of intercountry adoption, and not just the issuing of declarations of suitability, is now regulated and arranged between the central authorities of the sending and the receiving countries. In Ireland the central authority is the Adoption Authority.

Mr Shannon said at its last meeting the authority had agreed to send a delegation to India to put in place an administration agreement on intercountry adoption with that country’s central authority.

India, also a Hague Convention state, is now one of the main countries internationally from which children are adopted.

“This will be significant in terms of the numbers available for adoption,” Mr Shannon said.

Meanwhile, Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald said the majority of adoptions prior to the 2010 Act had been from non-Hague countries, with 160 from Russia in 2007, a number which fell to 118 in 2010. There were 75 adoptions from Ethiopia that year, and this fell to 48 in 2011. There were 136 adoptions from Vietnam in 2009, falling to 10 in 2010 and none last year.

Vietnam has recently signed the convention, and it is expected that adoptions from that country can resume when an administration agreement is signed. Ms Fitzgerald and Mr Shannon recently visited Vietnam to progress such an agreement.

Ms Fitzgerald said it was hoped to have agreement with the central authority in Washington soon so adoptions from Florida could be agreed.

The Irish Times – Friday, January 27, 2012

MARIE O’HALLORAN

A CLAIM by the Minister for Children viagra there is no evidence that previous adoptions in Mexico by Irish couples are unsafe has been challenged in the Dáil.

Frances Fitzgerald referred to the controversy in Mexico where 11 Irish couples had been questioned following the discovery of an international child-smuggling ring, after the arrest of three local women accused of buying children from their mothers.

During a Dáil debate on inter-country adoption, Ms Fitzgerald assured parents who had previously adopted from Mexico that the Adoption Authority of Ireland “has no evidence that previous adoptions are unsafe or are affected by the recent events in Mexico”.

Socialist Party TD Clare Daly questioned the statement and said that of 92 children adopted by Irish couples, 60 were arranged by a lawyer called Lopez, who was being sought by police in Mexico.

“How can the Irish Adoption Board say adoptions from Mexico are safe if the Mexican authorities are seeking an individual who has arranged two-thirds of those adoptions?” the Dublin North TD asked. The lawyer was being sought for “illegal practices in adoption involving 60 children adopted by Irish parents, yet the adoption board is on record as stating that all existing adoptions of Mexican children by Irish couples are safe. Both those scenarios cannot be correct.”

During the debate Ms Daly also criticised the media focus on the difficulties faced by up to 20 couples who desperately wanted to adopt from Vietnam, saying they had ignored the plight of 55,000 adopted adults in Ireland, “many of whom were illegally adopted in the State”. There was a “double standard” around adoption because in the past, “Ireland was a huge exporter of children, much to our shame”.

There was now a similar situation in other countries where “in many instances people in poor and difficult socioeconomic circumstances have been preyed upon”.

Sinn Féin spokesman on children Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin also highlighted the “shady motivation” of some adoption organisations overseas and warned of “baby businesses masquerading as adoptions organisations”.

“For many years poor children in Ireland were taken from their parents because others felt they ‘knew best’ and that there was a better class of parent elsewhere.

“It is not a mindset that should be applied or transferred from our past experience to any other jurisdiction today”. Ireland had to be “sensitive to the factors that lead parents in less well-off countries to place their children for adoption” and many would not give their children up if they could financially support them, he said.

Opening the debate, Ms Fitzgerald said events in Mexico served to reinforce the need to “ensure that all intercountry adoptions are properly regulated and effected in accordance with the provisions of the Hague Convention”, a set of “core standards designed to ensure good practice”. She said there was no provision for private adoptions in Mexico. The Adoption Authority registered 341 foreign adoptions in 2003, rising to a high of 397 in 2008, she added. The number had declined since, with about 200 inter-country adoptions in 2010 and 2011.

By Associated Press, Published: January 24

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Uruguay’s president has approved a $513,000 payment to Macarena Gelman, who was illegally adopted during the dictatorship after her mother was tortured and disappeared.

The payment complies with an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling that accuses Uruguay of delaying justice for crimes committed by its dictatorship in the 1970s, according to a brief statement posted Tuesday on the presidency’s website.

Gelman’s parents were kidnapped in Argentina and taken to a torture center notorious for being a nexus of Operation Condor, the effort by South America’s U.S.-supported dictatorships to combine forces and eliminate opponents in each other’s countries.

Her father was then killed and her pregnant mother spirited to Uruguay, where she disappeared after giving birth in a military hospital.
Decades passed before Macarena Gelman learned her true identity, as the granddaughter of renowned Argentine poet Juan Gelman.
Macarena Gelman now works for Argentina’s human rights agency. She declined to comment Tuesday on recieving the award from President Jose Mujica, and said she doesn’t know if an ongoing study of human remains found inside an Uruguayan military facility has turned up any links to her missing mother.

About 30 people disappeared in Uruguay under the 1973-1985 dictatorship. In neighboring Argentina, more than 150 Uruguayans were killed as part of Operation Condor. Leftist Tupamaro guerrillas also had committed violent crimes, including 57 killings, according to a military tally, after taking up arms in 1963 against democratically elected governments. Many of the guerrillas died in confrontations or served long prison terms, including Mujica, a former Tupamaro who spent more than a decade behind bars.

Juan Gelman won the 2007 Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award for Spanish-language literature. A journalist and left-wing political activist as well as a poet, he broke with the Communist Party and later with Argentina’s Montoneros guerrillas over their violent tactics.

By Janaka Perera
Colombo, 23 January, (Asiantribune.com):
Have all doubts about the case involving Blessed Teresa’s Home, ‘Prem Nivasa’ run by the Missionaries of Charity at Rawatawatte Moratuwa in Sri Lanka been cleared?

According to the Patriotic Bhikku Front, Chinthana Parshadaya and Sinhala Bauddhayo the speed in which the investigations were supposedly completed has given cause to strong suspicions since Cardinal Malcolm Ranjit had threatened to boycott State-sponsored Christmas festivities unless Rev. Sister Mary Eliza – the nun in charge of the home – was released before Christmas last year. In less than two weeks after the threat was issued the case against Sister Eliza was withdrawn on the advice of the Attorney General in time for the Cardinal to attend a Christmas festival held under the President’s patronage at Temple Trees on December 22.

The three organizations demand to know why there is no response yet on the part of the authorities to their appeal for reopening the case involving ‘Prem Nivasa.’

Earlier, they strongly condemned Cardinal Ranjit’s statement on the raid the National Child Protection Authority conducted on the home last November. The Cardinal’s reaction, they alleged, amounted to interference in the sovereignty of the people as guaranteed by the Constitution.

At a press briefing held at the Sri Lanka Foundation after the nun’s release, the three organizations issued a joint statement which attributed the withdrawal of the case to pressure from the Cardinal.

General Secretary, Patriotic Bhikku Front Venerable Bengamuwe Nalaka said that the even decision to close the case was not legal. According to him there had been 17 pregnant women, 73 children and 16-year-old pregnant girl and another young mother of the same age in the home at the time of the raid.

Professor Nalin de Silva representing the Chinthana Parshadaya expressed his strong disapproval of the investigations being suspended.

Professor Udaya Kumarasinghe, Professor of Criminology of Sri Jayewardenepura University said that the Cardinal should have acted with more restraint in responding to the raid on the children’s home. He called the blanket condemnation of such a raid an expression of indifference to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention came into force in January 2002 and seeks to prohibit the sale of children for (1).sexual exploitation (2). organ trade (3) forced labour (4) illegal adoptions (5).prostitution and (6) pornography.

Lawyers for Human Rights and Development (LHRD was also represented at the press briefing. It has shown a keen interest in combating trafficking of women and children for prostitution, forced labour and illegal foreign adoptions during the past two decades.

Executive Director LHRD, Kalyananda Thiranagama said that his organization had issued a report on illegal sale of children to foreigners after investigating the matter during a period of five years – from 2000 to 2005. The probe had revealed there were eight state-run children’s homes and 223 privately run institutions and that illegal trafficking in babies had been going in the country since the1980s.The report with its findings had been forwarded to State Agencies for necessary action.

Thiranagama added that children illegally sold to foreigners are mostly those born into poor Buddhist and Hindu families. Each child had been sold between Rs. 1.1 million and Rs. 22 million.

According to LHRD large scale trafficking of children had occurred in the decade 1980 – 1990 from Sri Lanka for illegal foreign adoptions. Every year between 750 and 1500 Sri Lankan children had been sold for foreign adoptions. During the period 1964 – 1991 altogether 11,562 children were given for foreign adoptions. Running baby farms and providing infants for foreign adoptions was a lucrative business.

After the laws relating to foreign adoptions were relaxed in 1979, the number of children given for foreign adoptions had increased yearly. By 1980, the number of children given for foreign adoptions within one year increased to 624. With the relaxation of the law, there was a heavy demand for children for foreign adoptions, which the existing children’s homes could not meet. This situation led to the flourishing of infamous ‘baby farms’ in many areas in the country where pregnant women were kept together for delivering babies. The number of children given for foreign adoptions continued to increase year by year, the number reaching 1629 in 1986.

One of these studies on this issue was done by Thomas Bibin, a reporter for the Swedish National Radio,. His Study titled “Adoptions and Black Money – The Colombo Connection,” was given publicity on all three national radio channels in Sweden on November 18, 1991.

Certain Sri Lankan government officials, businessmen with political links and even some ministers had been involved in this illegal human trafficking.

Testifying before the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on May 23, 1991 on the conduct of NGOs the then Commissioner of Probation and Child Care Services Padma Ranasinghe gave a detailed account of children given for foreign adoptions since 1964 and the role of the private sector in this trade. Out of more than 10,000 infants given for foreign adoptions during the period 1977 – 1990, only 453 children had been given from State Children’s Homes. All the others had been provided by children’s homes run by voluntary organizations and private individuals.

On analyzing the material gathered for this study – though there was no direct evidence – LHRD came across material that strongly suggested trafficking of children for illegal foreign adoptions was still going on in a ‘legalized form.’ The following are some of the findings made in this.

There were names of certain organizations that transpired in the studies conducted prior to 1992 and in Parliamentary Debates. It was some of these same organizations that continued to provide bulk of the children given for foreign adoptions.

Among the baby farms cited in early studies were those at Tamil tenements in Kotahena and Maradana, Wattala and Hendala. Several children’s homes functioning in Borella, Moratuwa, Wattala and Kotahena admitted only orphans and deserted children.

In 95 out of the 121 cases that were perused for this study children were provided from four homes run by four religious institutions situated at Mutwal Nayaka Kanda, Borella and Moratuwa:

However Fr. Tyrone Perera the Parish Priest, Rawatawatte defending the role of Prem Nivasa told the press that the home had prevented abortions and the lives of many babies were saved. He strongly denied the home sold any child without parents’ consent and without proper legal approval.

The question that remains is not whether the Rev. Sister Eliza was personally involved in any illegal activity but whether no stone was left unturned in doing a thorough inquiry into the past and present activities of the home.

Illegal child trafficking and baby farms is plaguing the whole world and Sri Lanka is no exception. Although exploitation of children has been one of the most heinous crimes throughout history and continuing to this day so far no government or the UN has succeeded in effectively curbing this menace.

- Asian Tribune –

ZAPOPAN, MEXICO – Life seemed to give Karla Zepeda a break when a woman came to her dusty neighborhood of cinderblock homes and dirt roads looking for babies to photograph in an anti-abortion ad campaign.

The woman asked to use the 15-year-old’s baby girl in a two-week photo shoot for $755, a small fortune for a teen mother who earns $180 a month at a sandwich stand and shares a small, one-story house with her disabled mother, stepfather, and three brothers.

But 9-month-old Camila wasn’t just posing for photographs.

Jalisco state investigators say the child was left for weeks at a time in the care of an Irish couple who had come to Ajijic, a town of cobblestone streets and gated communities 37 miles away, thinking they were adopting her.

Prosecutors say the baby was apparently part of an illegal adoption ring that ensnared destitute young Mexican women trying to earn more for their children and childless Irish couples desperate to become parents.

Camila and nine other children have been turned over to state officials who suspect they were being groomed for illegal adoptions. And authorities hint that far more children could be involved: Lead investigator Blanca Barron told reporters the ring may have been operating for 20 years, though she gave no details. Prosecutors also say four of the children show signs of sexual abuse, though they gave no details on how or by whom.

Nine people have been detained, including two suspected leaders of the ring, but no one has yet been charged.

At least 15 Irish citizens have been questioned, the Jalisco state attorney general’s office said, but officials have not released their names. Neighbors say most or all have returned to Ireland after spending weeks or months in Ajijic trying to meet requirements for adopting a child. None was detained.

For Karla Zepeda, the story began in August, when she was approached by Guadalupe Bosquez and agreed to lend her daughter for an anti-abortion advertising campaign, she told The Associated Press. Bosquez later returned with another woman, Silvia Soto, and gave her half the money as they picked the child up. She got the rest two weeks later when they brought Camila home.

“They showed me a poster that showed my girl with other babies and said ‘No To Abortion, Yes To Life,”‘ said Karla, a petite girl cleaning her house to loud norteno music. “I thought it was legal because everything seemed very normal.”

Before long, the message spread to her neighbors. Seven other women, most between the ages of 15 and 22, agreed to let their babies be part of the ad campaign. Some already had several children. Some are single mothers. One of them doesn’t know how to read or write. Five of them told they AP that they did not even have birth certificates for their babies when they came across Bosquez and Soto.

One said she needed money to pay for her child’s medical care, another to finish building an extra room on her house.
All deny agreeing to give their children up for adoption.

“We’re going through a nightmare,” said Fernanda Montes, an 18-year-old housewife who said she took part to pay a $670 hospital bill from the birth of her 3-month-old. “How could we have trusted someone so evil?”

The women say that Bosquez and Soto persuaded three of them to register their children as single mothers so they could participate in the anti-abortion campaign, even though they live with the children’s fathers.

Children’s rights activists say that also could have made it easier to release the child for adoption: only the mother’s signature would be needed.

The mothers were assured that the babies were being taken care of by several nannies and checked by doctors. The babies often returned home wearing new clothes.

Some of the mothers said they began having second thoughts. But when they declined to send their children back, they say, Bosquez and Soto insisted they would have to pay for the strollers, car seats, diaper bags and everything else they had bought for the babies.

Investigators say that Bosquez and Soto were taking the children to a hotel in Guadalajara, where they met with Irish couples who believed they were going to adopt them.

The plan began to unravel on Jan. 9, when local police detained 21-year-old Laura Carranza and accused her of trying to sell her 2-year-old daughter.

Investigators said Carranza denied that allegation, but acknowledged she was “renting” her 8-month-old son. She then led authorities to Bosquez and Soto.

Both are now being held on suspicion they ran the alleged anti-abortion ad campaign as a front for an illegal adoption ring.

It was not clear if they have attorneys and they have not yet been brought before a judge to say if they accept or reject the allegations.

Carranza is also being held, as is Karla’s mother, Cecilia Velazquez, who hasn’t worked since she lost both legs in a traffic accident in 2010. Karla says her mother’s only fault was agreeing to the ad campaign.

Seven of the mothers interviewed told the AP that the children had most recently been picked up by Bosquez and Soto between Dec. 27 and Dec. 30 for an alleged photo shoot. They returned the babies on Jan. 9 and 10, saying “there had been problems.” The mothers said they didn’t notice anything wrong with the babies or any signs of abuse.

Then state police investigators showed up at their homes and drove them and their children to the police department for questioning. The babies were taken from them and put into state protective custody. The women complained that only four of them have been allowed to see their babies since, and only once.

A statement from Jalisco state prosecutors’ said authorities seized Carranza’s two children and the other seven while they were with Irish couples. Prosecutors didn’t respond to requests by the AP to clarify the discrepancy.

Residents of Ajijic, a town on the shore of Lake Chapala favored by American and Canadian retirees, say Irish citizens looking to adopt Mexican children began appearing there at least four years ago.

Jalisco state prosecutors’ spokesman Lino Gonzalez wouldn’t confirm the Irish had left, but said none had been charged with a crime.

Even if they had adopted the children, Ireland might not have accepted them because the adoptions were handled privately, said Frances FitzGerald, Ireland’s minister for children.

“Obviously, for any couple caught up in this, it’s a nightmare scenario,” she said.

“What you can’t have in Mexico is people going to local agencies or individuals doing private adoptions because they come back, there is going to be a difficulty.”

Prosecutors say they have been trying without success to reach the attorneys who were handling the adoption paperwork in the neighboring state of Colima.

Custody release statements signed by all of the mothers carry the logo of Lopez y Lopez Asociados, a firm owned by Carlos Lopez Valenzuela and his son, Carlos Lopez Castellanos. Authorities raided the office last week.

The release statements were shown to the AP by a local advocate for missing and stolen children, Juan Manuel Estrada of Fundacion FIND, who said they had been leaked to him by a state official. He said Lopez Valenzuela had separately sent him a lengthy statement by email declaring that he too may have been duped in the case and denying wrongdoing.

Prosecutors wouldn’t confirm the authenticity of that statement, but it mirrors the stories of seven mothers who were interviewed by the AP.

According to the statement Lopez said he had handled adoptions in Colima state for 63 Irish couples since 2004. He said he first met Bosquez when she approached him in 2009 about giving her own unborn child up for adoption to an Irish couple, a process, he wrote, that was completed legally.

The statement said that Bosquez also introduced Lopez to a social worker who together brought him the current case involving Zepeda and the other women from Zapopan, apparently hoping he could match the children to adopting couples.

It says Lopez was told the mothers wanted only to deal with the two women, and he agreed. The young mothers confirmed they never met Lopez.

According to the statement, Lopez said that 12 Irish couples had been paying for what they thought was the medical care of pregnant women on the request of the social worker, though all the children were already born when their mothers first came across Bosquez and Soto.

Lopez didn’t respond to emailed interview requests from the AP.

According to the statement, Lopez said he follows the stringent adoption laws set by the Hague Adoption Convention, which Mexico has signed.

Unlike Guatemala or China, Mexico has not been a popular destination for foreigners looking to adopt, perhaps because the process, done by law, is complicated.

“The legal adoption process in Mexico is difficult, but cheating in Mexico is very easy,” Estrada said.

By Associated Press, Published: January 23
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — The Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan is allowing foreign adoptions to resume, issuing the first permit to a U.S.-based Christian organization.

The Social Development Ministry said Monday it chose Christian World Adoption after a rigorous selection process.

Christian World Adoption says the move would allow it to resume adoptions from Kyrgyzstan. International adoptions were suspended in Kyrgyzstan in 2009 as authorities sought to improve regulations and root out corruption in the process.

Almost one-third of the 216 Kyrgyz children adopted between 2005 and 2008 went to the United States.

Asseem Shaikh TNN

Pune: A special court’s refusal on Tuesday to issue direction to the Central Bureau of Investigation to further probe into the inter-country adoption racket, involving the city-based Preet Mandir, has left a 70-year-old woman distressed in her fight against the adoption centre to get back her two granddaughters.

Kisabai Tulsiram Lokhande, a resident of Khandala in Satara district, had handed over her granddaughters — Komal and Ashwini — to an observation home at Karad for taking care and providing education, following the death of their parents in 2004-05. However, the Satara child welfare committee without taking Lokhande’s consent shifted the girls to Preet Mandir for rehabilitation.

Lokhande, in a plea filed before the court, had alleged that Preet Mandir in connivance with government-run agencies had “sold” the girls for Rs 5-25 lakh. Lokhande argued through her lawyers that Preet Mandir had issued an advertisement in a local Marathi daily to show that the girls were destitute.

In a plea filed before the Satara police on January 23, 2009, Lokhande had prayed to register a criminal case against the people responsible for illegally transferring the girls, but no action was taken. The Bombay high court on November 4, 2009, dismissed Lokhande’s petition seeking criminal charges against the suspects observing that the petitioner should take the case before the proper forum.
Lokhande, then, filed a special leave petition before the Supreme Court challenging the HC order, but she withdrew the petition after a lawyer of Preet Mandir-run Balwant Kartar Foundation submitted that the HC had ordered the CBI to investigate all adoption cases between 2000 and 2006.

Her lawyers Arundhati Pawar and Pradeep Havnur argued in the special court that her case was not referred to the CBI and pressed to issue directions to continue investigations further as per section 173 (8) of the Criminal Procedure Code.
CBI special public prosecutor Manoj Chaldan opposed the plea on the grounds that she had no ‘locus standi’ to appeal for further investigation as she was not party to the adoption case. The CBI submitted that it had registered an FIR and filed chargesheet against the suspects involved in the adoption case as per the directions of the HC, but it did not come across her granddaughters’ case. The CBI argued that the special court did not have the jurisdiction to direct it to continue investigations further as such power was vested with higher courts.

Special judge D R Mahajan said Lokhande had not complained to the CBI about the alleged adoption and nor was her statement recorded and instead of approaching proper forum she had approached a wrong forum. The judge observed that Lokhande had no right to seek directions for continuing the investigations further and that the court was also not empowered to issue such directions.
“At the most, Lokhande can now approach the CBI with a complaint in respect of the adoption of her granddaughters and the CBI can take cognizance of her complaint. If the CBI fails to take cognizance, then the only remedy available was to approach the constitutional courts for necessary directions,” the court order said while dismissing her plea.

Lawyer Pradeep Havnur and Anjali Pawar, president of Sakhee, working for child rights, and who is pursuing the case, said, “The lawyer of Preet Mandir has misled the Supreme Court that the CBI would investigate the case of the two girls. We will now again file a special leave petition in the Supreme Court, seeking directions to the CBI to conduct further investigations”.

Lokhande is a vegetable vendor. Komal was seven years old and Ashwini was five years old when they were kept in the adoption centre by their grandmother. It is being alleged that they have been given in adoption to a family in Spain, Pawar said.

By Kathryn Joyce
Dec 21 2011, 7:19 AM ET 2

As the “searchers” who track down adopted children’s histories increasingly uncover stories of fraud, corruption, and worse, these specialists are facing threats and even violence

Mirette and Elsabet Franklin, ages 4 and 6, biological sisters adopted in Ethiopia, listen to the singing of the national anthem during a U.S. naturalization ceremony / AP

In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I’ll call Kelly adopted an eight-year old girl, “Mary,” from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She’d sought out a child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption. She came to this determination after hiring what’s known as an adoption searcher.

Adoption searchers — specialized independent researchers working in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know exists — track down the birth families of children adopted from other counties. In Ethiopia, searching has arisen in response to a dramatic boom in international adoptions from the country in recent years. In 2010, Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the U.S. The number of Ethiopian children adopted into foreign families in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a few hundred several years ago to several thousand last year. The increase has been so rapid — and, for some, so lucrative — that some locals have said adoption was “becoming the new export industry for our country.”

That increase has also brought stories of corruption, child trafficking, and fraud. Parents began to publicize the stories their adopted children told them when they learned English: that they had parents and families at home, who sometimes thought they were going to the U.S. to receive an education and then return. Media investigations have found evidence that adoption agencies had recruited children from intact families. Ethiopia’s government found that some children’s paperwork had been doctored to list children who had been relinquished by living parents as orphans instead, which allowed the agencies to avoid lengthy court vetting procedures.

“Her entire paperwork, except for a couple of names, was completely falsified,” Kelly said. Mary’s paperwork listed her as two years younger than she was; it said she had one older sister when she in fact had two younger sisters; and, most importantly, it said her mother had died years ago. “One day I said to Mary, ‘You know how your paperwork says you were five and you’re really seven?” Kelly recalled. “It also says that your mom’s dead.’ And she goes, ‘My mom’s not dead.’ She was adamant that her mother wasn’t dead, and in fact she wasn’t. Her mom is alive and it took our searcher just two days to find her.”

Kelly, through a friend who’d also adopted from Ethiopia, hired a searcher. She sent copies of all her paperwork and waited for him to make the nine-hour drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, to the northern region from which Mary had been adopted.

The searcher determined Mary’s real birth date, that her birth family and mother were OK with the adoption, and also collected some photos as well as information about Mary’s background. Kelly is planning to take Mary back to visit her family in March.

“I wanted to verify that she hadn’t been stolen. I searched with the intention of sending her back to Ethiopia if I found out she’d been stolen,” said Kelly.

Kelly doesn’t believe her agency knowingly falsified the information. As with many cases of fraud or corruption in Ethiopia’s adoption program, it seems that the story was changed at the local level, long before the adoption proceeded to the country’s federal courts and oversight agencies. Mary’s grandfather, who had often been her main caregiver, relinquished the child while her mother was working elsewhere in Ethiopia; something that was only possible because he and several witnessed claimed that the mother had died.

“I can’t imagine the weight that was on her,” Kelly said of Mary’s recollection of her home in Ethiopia. “After I told her the paperwork said her mom was dead, she thought maybe she was dead and nobody told her. So it was huge for her to know she was right, that her mother was alive. I was lucky she remembered and was strong enough to stick with her story.”

SEARCHING

This summer, I accompanied a young Ethiopian searcher I’ll call Samuel on a birth family interview: a trek deep into the rural countryside of Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR), the province of origin for many Ethiopian children adopted to the West, to locate the family of a toddler-age girl adopted to Canada.

Starting in the southern town of Sodo, we took a 12-mile drive through rural roads that were so bad it took over an hour: first over deeply-potted dirt throughways, cutting across expanses of grazing land, then off-road until we arrived at a hamlet so small and remote it might have been impossible to find without a guide. But even this village — a handful of houses and an HIV clinic — was not our destination. We took a dirt path through the backcountry, but our Land Ranger got stuck in deep trenches of mud. A handful of local children emerged shyly from the bordering fields and led us, on foot, the last half mile up to a solitary mud-walled house surrounded by lush gardens and neatly fenced in with stripped tree branches.

When we arrived, only a toddler boy stood in the front yard, naked below the waist. But the spectacle of several travelers carrying tripod and camera quickly drew nearly 30 neighboring children and adults, who watched solemnly while Samuel framed shots of the exterior of the house. The birthmother Samuel sought to interview, a widow in her early 40s with seven other children still at home, was called from a neighbor’s house to host her unexpected guests. She smilingly obliged without question when Samuel and his colleagues explained that they’d come to film for several hours at the request of her daughter’s new adoptive parents. Sitting in a chair in the fields behind her house, her fingertips pressed together and her eyes cast down, she answered dozens of questions about her background, her remaining children, and the circumstances of her husband’s death, which had prompted the adoption.

 Michael Tsegaye Full Screen
 Michael Tsegaye
Taxis and donkeys vie for space on a busy street in Sodo, a city in the Southern Nations Nationalities and People’s Region, where many Ethiopian adoptees come from.  Michael Tsegaye
People walking in Sodo, outside of the town center.  Michael Tsegaye
“Samuel” the adoption searcher and his team approach the home of a birth family.  Michael Tsegaye
A neighbor’s child stands outside the home of birth family we were looking for. Their home is constructed primarily from branches, mud, and straw.  Michael Tsegaye
Inside the home of the birth family, not pictured to protect their privacy.  Michael Tsegaye
Livestock graze outside the homes of neighbors.  Michael Tsegaye
Rural Ethiopians walk for miles to collect water, reach a market, clinic, or school. Unpaved roads and a lack of transportation leave rural families just 20 kilometers outside Sodo isolated from the world. Taxis and donkeys vie for space on a busy street in Sodo, a city in the Southern Nations Nationalities and People’s Region, where many Ethiopian adoptees come from. For several years, Samuel, a soft-spoken filmmaker from Addis Ababa in his mid-20s, has traveled deep into Ethiopia’s countryside to locate the remaining parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors of Ethiopian children adopted to the U.S. and Europe. For a moderate fee — around $600, including travel and lodging expenses for a two or three person crew — he would create a DVD of interviews with family members and a brief glimpse of the country the child came from. He started doing this work for a prominent U.S. adoption agency then later moved on to independent production, working from a script of 60 to 70 questions he’d compile with the adoptive family to ask of whatever closest relative or neighbor could be found.

But, in the past several years, it’s become increasingly difficult to find a searcher in Ethiopia. Tasked with determining whether an adopted child is a “manufactured orphan,” searchers have faced intense intimidation in Ethiopia as its adoption system boomed and then came under international scrutiny. It took months to find adoptive families willing to share the name or contact information for searchers they had used. The first several times I emailed or called Samuel, he responded with trepidation, confirming with me repeatedly that I was not associated with any adoption agencies working in Ethiopia and that I wouldn’t pass on his name or information to any agencies.

He had good reason to be cautious. In August 2010, Samuel was jailed for 41 days in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray, which shares a hostile border with neighboring Eritrea. He had traveled to the region to film two birth family interviews, one of which Samuel says he did pro bono out of his respect for the family, which had adopted an HIV-positive child. When Samuel met the birth sister of one of the children whose story he was tracking, the local director of a U.S. adoption agency came along, and began accusing Samuel of giving the agency a bad name. (Out of fear of further repercussions, Samuel requested that the agency not be named.) Shortly thereafter, Samuel and his crew were arrested. While in jail, he was told that the arrest was made at the request of the agency, which had accused him of performing illegal adoptions and of filming the “bad side” of Ethiopia to sell to the Eritrean government. An employee of the agency was also arrested — it’s still not clear why — as well as three of Samuel’s friends and a translator.

Although his jailers treated him as a serious criminal, in time, with the help of U.S. adoptive families, Samuel’s case reached the attention of the U.S. and federal Ethiopian governments. Families who had adopted through the agency raised thousands of dollars for bail and led a letter-writing campaign that spurred the Ethiopian ambassador to the U.S., at the consulate in Los Angeles, to get involved.

Lisa Veleff Day, a Portland, Maine, mother to two Ethiopian children, participated in the campaign. A number of families in Portland have adopted from Ethiopia, and several had turned to Samuel to help uncover their children’s backgrounds — often after they became suspicious of the stories their agencies had told them. Veleff Day did not hire Samuel — she was able to find information about her children through a member of their birth family with ties to Portland — but she had used the same agency that was behind his jailing and had come to doubt their ethics. During one of the last steps of her adoption — an appointment with the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa to secure a visa — the agency’s country representative coached her to say that her children’s birth parents were dead. The representative threatened Veleff Day that the adoption would fall through if she did not.

“Right before we went into the embassy, we were told that there were certain things we needed to say. We were being coached. We were supposed to say that both of these parents were dead. We knew that not to be true. They were telling us to lie,” says Veleff Day. “He said if you don’t say these things, there will be questions and you won’t be able to leave with the kids. We really felt like we were over a barrel, so we did what they said. I’m not proud of that, but they waited this long to coach us, because otherwise we wouldn’t have felt as compelled to do what they said.”

“Not only had [Samuel] been arrested,” recalled Veleff Day, “but the family member, the uncle of a child adopted by friends of ours, was arrested when he started bringing food and water to him. The agency used scare tactics: you talk to this guy, and you might be arrested too.”

While Samuel typically finds little more than discrepancies in the children’s ages — younger children are widely considered more attractive to adoptive families — sometimes he finds that birth families receive no word about their children despite agency promises for updates. One birth family was not even aware their child had been sent to America. Sometimes, Samuel says, birth families are complicit in these falsehoods, making stories they think are more conducive to getting their children adopted.

“People are promoting adoption to foreigners and the birth families were fooled by some adoption advocates,” Samuel said. “They got the wrong information about adoption: that if you send this child, you will get some money from the adoptive parents and you’ll be someone great.”

The contradictions unearthed by searchers in recent years have damaged the reputations of adoption agencies in Ethiopia. Agencies, some adoptive parents claim, have retaliated against searchers, with legal action, jail time, and even death threats.

A PERFECT STORM

Karen Smith-Rotabi, an inter-country adoption scholar at the Virginia Commonwealth University, has found that after previous “hotspot” adoption countries such as Guatemala closed down — widespread ethical problems, from coercion to outright kidnapping led the country’s adoption authority to suspend the program pending reforms — Ethiopia became “a perfect storm for an emerging adoption industry.” Its short waiting periods and high availability of very young children made it attractive to international adoption agencies. Some agencies accused of deeply unethical behavior in Guatemala are widely thought by international adoption experts to have moved their operations to Ethiopia.

“As Guatemala’s adoption industry ground to a halt at the end of 2007,
many American adoption agencies began setting up new adoption programs
in Ethiopia,” says Erin Siegal, author of the book Finding Fernanda, an investigation of corruption in adoption cases from Guatemala. Ethiopia, which is not a signatory to the Hague Adoption Convention, a standard for international adoption practices, gave an opportunity to agencies unable to win Hague accreditation. In some cases, Siegal says, it seemed to save the businesses of agencies in financial trouble after Guatemala shut down.

“The fundamental issue in Ethiopia is extreme poverty, and that the birth family’s idea of adoption is different than ours,” Smith-Rotabi said. “Ethiopians don’t have that conception of a clean break from one family to another. Some really think that their child is going to get an education and they’ll see them again. You have a very sophisticated, legalistic society communicating with a very poor, traditional one.”

When people see birth families benefitting from their choice to relinquish their child, she said, that can have a contagious effect in these communities. “It takes over a whole village very quickly. It’s very dangerous stuff, playing with people’s poverty, emotions, and needs in a way that’s really quite profound.”

“Parents, especially from rural areas, still believe that they are sending their children so they can get money,” said Mehari Maru, a human rights lawyer in Ethiopia whom the Ethiopian government invited to propose an institutional framework for international adoption. “They are not told what adoption means, that they will have other parents. They think about the money they will get and their children’s welfare.”

“Much of the potential for abuse through non-regulation is at a local level,” said Doug Webb, Chief of Section for Adolescent Development, Protection, and HIV/AIDS at UNICEF Ethiopia, which is working closely with the Ethiopian government to establish a more comprehensive domestic child welfare system in the country. “A lot of the arrangements and paperwork that makes things appear differently than they are happens at the local level, out there in the bush with brokers, agents, officials, and policemen. Once the paperwork reaches the federal level, in some cases, the opportunity for abuse may have already been taken.”

Smith-Rotabi warned that Ethiopia must learn from other countries that have seen sharp rises in adoption. In Guatemala, adoption corruption eventually came to have what she called “hidden structures of organized crime,” with critics facing so much intimidation that many hired bodyguards. In one case, she says, a scholar researching adoption there disappeared completely and is presumed dead.

Ethiopia’s federal government is working to address problems in the country’s adoption system. But the adoption industry has become so lucrative and so strong, especially in rural parts of the country, that many people who’ve raised questions about the process say they’ve faced intimidation and harassment from the industry.

‘CAN’T DO INDEPENDENT RESEARCH’

In 2009, Arun Dohle, a researcher for the non-profit Against Child Trafficking (ACT), traveled to Ethiopia to investigate 25 adoptions handled by the Dutch agency Wereldkinderen Child Welfare Association. The research was commissioned by the agency but, when Dohle’s findings led to him being “put out” of the country, ACT published the report independently under the title “Fruits of Ethiopia, Intercountry Adoption: The Rights of the Child, or the ‘Harvesting’ of Children?”

“We were seriously threatened by the orphanage directors and by the local representative of the agency we were working with as well,” Dohle said. “We got a letter from Ethiopian orphanages saying we were involved in illegal adoptions. The social worker [I was working with] was accused of damaging the image of Ethiopia. It proves you can’t do independent research.” He added, “Of course [the research] was actually legal, but they were dropping high-up names of politicians.”

In his research, Dohle found that a majority of the 25 cases included clear ethical concerns. These included living and easily-identified parents listed as dead or unknown, agency or orphanage representatives giving false information on court documents, parents relinquishing children in the stated hopes of receiving support from adoptive families, and orphanages recruiting children directly from intact families. He recorded testimony stating that some child recruiters are salaried employees of orphanages and work to collect children from villages, health centers, and other places families visit. He also found, much as Smith-Rotabi later suggested to me, that Ethiopian families don’t have the same understanding of adoption that Western agencies do.

The report explains that research came “to an abrupt end” when a local representative of the agency learned of Dohle’s research and “threatened to report the researcher to the Ethiopian immigration or police.”

Officials from two orphanages that Dohle had identified as problematic (both of which have since been closed by the Ethiopian government), Bethezatha Children’s Home Association and Gelegela Integrated Orphans and Destitute Family Support Association, sent a letter to Wereldkinderen accusing him of engaging in illegal adoptions; of “terrorizing the families of children who have been placed in the Netherlands” by claiming that children are being sold for compensation, for organ harvesting, or for experimental HIV medication testing (his report made none of these claims); and of taking birth families hostage during interviews. “These situations have proven to be rather problematic to our operations,” the letter stated. It demanded that all Wereldkinderen adoptions be investigated, claiming that the investigation impugned not only the orphanages in question but the government of Ethiopia as well.

A NEW ADOPTION LANDSCAPE

The adoption landscape is changing rapidly in Ethiopia. Amid mounting evidence of fraud and ethical problems, the Ethiopian government announced in March that it was putting the brakes on its international adoption program, slowing by 60 to 90 percent the rate at which it processes paperwork for children being internationally adopted. It also revoked the license of one adoption agency accused of creating fraudulent documents for adoptees. In July, the government began implementing a plan to close one third of the nation’s orphanages, shuttering those it found were functioning more as transitional homes for the adoption industry rather than providing care for children in need; to date, 23 in the SNNPR region have been shut down. People with knowledge of the industry told me that agencies were firing staff in response to the slowdown and a number of agencies were expected to face closure without the revenue stream of steady Ethiopian adoptions. A UNICEF analysis of Ethiopian court data, however, indicates that the slowdown didn’t last long and that this fall, the number of adoptions being processed has bounced back to normal levels.

Still, UNICEF’s Doug Webb said that the environment in which these abuses took place has changed dramatically in the past year. “There are people in government who are very concerned about this, but we’ve turned a big corner here. The situation is over where alleged abuses were ignored, swept under the carpet; where nobody was listening and there was too much money involved.”

“In many ways,” Webb said, “that story is done. The climate has changed so much. Now it’s discussed more openly. The government at the highest levels is speaking out against abuses in the system.”

“I hope the slowdown is helping things,” said adoptive mother Lisa Veleff Day, “but I sort of doubt it. They say they’re checking things more carefully, but this is big business for Ethiopia. The terrible shame is there are so many kinds who are genuinely in need of adoption, and those are not the ones being adopted.”

The role of searchers won’t end any time soon, Samuel is certain. The thousands of Ethiopian children adopted by families in the U.S. and Europe over the last decade will grow up one day. They’ll learn about the circumstances around adoption from Ethiopia in earlier years and will want to find out the truth of their background.

Kelly paid $900 in 2009 for her searcher and Samuel charges an average rate of $600. But Kelly has since heard that her searcher increased his rates, asking as much as $3000 to $4000 for a search. When rising demand and supply made adoption an important and rapidly growing source of money in a country that had little of it, even these investigators who are often at odds with agencies have found a place in the adoption economy.

This article supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting