| THE LATEST AMENDMENTS TO THE ADOPTION LAW IN ROMANIA 04/09/2008 |
| (2008-09-04) |
| Last updated: 2008-09-05 16:41 EET |
Right after the fall of the Communist regime in Romania, the large number of institutionalized children, most of them abandoned, triggered a wave of international adoptions. Some 30 thousand children went to foreign families, but though the main reason invoked was a better life for them, in many cases it proved it was actually a very profitable business for those who played the intermediary part.
Dozens of foundations would present potential foreign parents with albums of available children, charging on paper 3 thousand dollars, but in reality claiming much more to accelerate the process. Therefore, there came a period in which international adoptions would prevail, to the detriment of the domestic ones. The issue of Romanian children placed in foreign families became the core of hot debates in 2001. In the report she drawn up on Romania, during its EU accession negotiations stage, European Parliament rapporteur Emma Nicholson harshly criticised the Bucharest authorities for frequent violations of the UN Children’s Rights Convention.
“Romania is a wonderful source of foster parents, because family as an institution and its values are very well developed’ she wrote, pleading for national adoptions, because, as the baroness also said, “once children leave their country of origin, they enter a different system, and only God knows what the future holds for them”.
As a consequence, a moratorium on adoptions was enforced in 2003. Two years later it was suspended, when Bucharest drafted a new law, under which Romanian children can only be adopted abroad only by relatives up to the second degree of kinship. The decision triggered protests in the US, Israel, France, Italy and Spain, where most of the families wanting Romanian children lived.
After four years of implementation of the new law, following pressure by the European Commission, on Wednesday, the law came back to the Romanian Government, who decided to reintroduce the principle of confidentiality, in keeping with the Strasbourg Convention.
Therefore, the adoption process will no longer involve birth parents and adoptive parents knowing each other. Moreover, neither of the parties will have access to the contact data of the other. Also, the consent of the birth parents will be compulsory in all stages of the adoption process, not only in the beginning and upon its completion. Representatives of the Pro Adoption NGO believe that the new regulation does nothing but extend the duration of the adoption process, which currently takes about one year.
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2025-04-03
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