Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Inter-Country Adoption Administration



Despite having no workable legislation on domestic adoption, and no international adoption agencies registered in the country, 35 children are living in a government facility waiting for potential placement overseas
A history of adoption hiatuses
Adoptions from Cambodia have been stop-and-start ever since a system was formally established in 1989: placements were first halted less than two years later, and suspensions have been announced half a dozen times in the decades since with varying degrees of follow-though.
The number of children who have left the country is not clear. According to figures reported by the Ministry of Social Affairs, 3,800 children left Cambodia between 1997 and 2009, but informal adoptions and poor record-keeping mean the real figure is likely higher.
Cambodia acceded to The Hague Adoption Convention in 2007, and passed the inter-country adoption law necessary to bring it into place in 2009. When it quickly became clear that the new law was not enough to stem the flow of “stolen” babies leaving the country, adoptions were suspended. Many countries had already withdrawn their cooperation by this point.
It is hard to establish a clear timeline for the subsequent hiatus, because of the frequency of announcements being made but not followed through.
The Ministry of Social Affairs has made almost annual announcements about potential dates for the resumption of adoption: initially March 2011, then January 2013, then an unspecified date in 2014.
The stalling is in large part
the result of an absence at
each stage of potential partner countries, who continue to doubt that sufficient progress has been made.
The past few years have been relatively quiet at Cambodia’s Inter-Country Adoption Administration. Since the country called a halt to international adoptions in 2009, there have been meetings to attend, paperwork to file and the occasional press call about Angelina Jolie Pitt to field. But until recently, there have been no new children to process.
Now there are 36, all but one residents of a state care facility near the Phnom Penh airport that houses children who are physically and mentally disabled, or HIV positive.
It was August last year when the children’s 36 files were carried from the Ministry of Social Affairs’ Child Welfare Department to the Inter-Country Adoption Administration in the neighbouring building. Now the administration’s small team is engaged in the complex task of completing the paperwork necessary to allow the children to be the first officially adopted out of the country in more than five years.
It’s a tricky business, and one they’re new to: previously, adoption agencies themselves bore much of the burden of selecting and readying children for sending overseas. “We need to follow all the procedures,” the office’s young director, Roeun Rithyroath, often repeats. “We don’t want to make mistakes with this.”
The need for caution is clear. For the past two decades, international adoptions have been one of the country’s most controversial talking points.
Founded on the shifting sands of a system where “orphans” for the most part still had living parents or close family, and with significant sums of money changing hands every time a child left Cambodia, the process of sending children overseas was often indistinguishable from human trafficking and nicknamed “baby selling” by the international press.
A prolonged hiatus
Under international pressure, and amid a string of scandals, Cambodia suspended international adoptions in 2009. The last children, whose cases were already in motion, left the country the following year.

 http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/departure-lounge-disabled-children

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