Safe Haven Bill, New Brunswick, Canada

I gladly pass on this call to action:

Call To Action
Government Of New Brunswick, Canada
Bill 60 - An Act to Amend the Family Services Act
[Safe Haven Bill]



The new proposed safe haven bill is a dangerous leap in the wrong direction for Canada’s child welfare system and most importantly for the rights of the child. At a time when the emphasis of global recognition is directed towards placing more safeguards for children and respect for the preservation of identity, the New Brunswick government is taking into consideration Bill 60 which would actually allow for safe havens to become part of New Brunswick’s system of Family Services.

Safe Haven’s have been introduced in the United States after lobbying efforts were successful. The rush to establish Safe Haven systems in the U.S. has allowed an opportunity for Canada to learn from the consequences of such “anonymous abandonment” systems. The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute released a detailed study in 2003 regarding the effects of the Safe Haven laws: “Unintended Consequences: ‘Safe Haven’ Laws are Causing Problems, Not Solving Them”. This study concluded that indeed the unintended consequences of the Safe Haven laws created addition problems without addressing the underlying issues that contribute to child abandonment. Below are just a few examples of the many negative consequences of Safe Haven systems.

 Safe Haven laws contribute to additional anonymous abandonment’s and do little to prevent unnecessary relinquishments.
 Safe Haven systems do nothing to preserve the rights of the child in respect to identity and biological history.
 The First Nations Adoption Act cannot be adequately respected under Safe Haven systems due to the lack of information on ethnic identity.
 Safe Haven systems dismiss the paternal rights.
 Safeguards against child trafficking will not properly be upheld if Safe Haven systems are allowed into Canadian laws.
 Minimal support is given to parents and little time is offered to ensure that the decision to surrender is fully done in the proper frame of mind and with the best interest of the child at heart.

As a community that has been touched by adoption on multiple levels, we reach out to the New Brunswick Government and respectfully request that the proposed ‘Bill 60- An Act To Amend Family Services Act’ is not instated. It is important that all provinces within Canada recognize the growing trend of child trafficking for adoption and the coercive methods used by the adoption industry to procure children. It is important that the Canadian government takes the firm approach necessary to put in place all safeguards possible to ensure that the children who are relinquished are done so under voluntary measures and are free from undue pressure and corruption. Counselling and adequate time should be offered to any parent who chooses to surrender their child. Proper identity of the parents and all necessary procedures to preserve the identity of the child must be taken.

In the year 2009, it is no longer considered acceptable to allow for anonymous abandonment’s of children. We now know that this method is not only harmful to the child, but also to the parents and the community as a whole. Preservation of identity and laws are more important now than ever before.

It is our hope that the New Brunswick Government will take into consideration the moral and legal dilemmas associated with Safe Haven laws and work to properly establish more support and education systems geared towards preventing infant abandonment. Ideally with a well-structured system that includes multiple safeguards, the best interests of the child and parents will continue to be a priority. Allowing Safe Haven laws to become part of Canada’s system of family services would be a shameful step in the wrong direction.

Sincerely,


Proposed Bill was introduced by Jody Carr -- Progressive Conservative member from Oromocto
Please write to each member of the New Brunswick Government below:

JODY CARR (PC)
Email: Jody.CARR@gnb.ca
Phone: (506) 453-7494
Fax: (506) 453-3461
Mailing Address
Old Education Building, East Block
P. O. Box 6000
Fredericton, NB
E3B 5H1

David Alward
Leader of the Official Opposition
General Information: (506) 444-2324
Reception: (506) 444-2324
Fax: (506) 453-3461
Email: david.alward@gnb.ca
Mailing Address
Old Education Building, East Block
P. O. Box 6000
Fredericton, NB
E3B 5H1

Social Development Minister Mary Schryer
HON. MARY SCHRYER (L), MLA
Quispamsis, Electoral District 30 / Legislative Assembly
Phone: (506) 457-7866
Fax: (506) 453-2164
EMail Address: mary.schryer@gnb.ca
Mailing Address
Sartain MacDonald Building
P. O. Box 6000
Fredericton, NB
E3B 5H1

HON. SHAWN GRAHAM, Premier
Contact Information
Phone: (506) 453-2144
Fax: (506) 453-7407
EMail Address: Shawn.Graham@gnb.ca
Mailing Address
Centennial Building
P. O. Box 6000
Fredericton, NB
E3B 5H1

Why Bulgaria should learn from Malawi when it gets to children's rights

I strongly recommend the following article to anyone interested in children's rights and intercountry adoption. It analyses in an excellent way why Bulgaria should learn from Malawi: that it is the State's obligation to look after children, and not to expatriate them.

Madonna’s failed adoption attempt shows Bulgaria has a lot to learn from Malawi about upholding children’s rights

In 2009 - two years after having become a member of the European Union and thus fullfilling the EU human rights criteria - Bulgaria has decided to go back to their old practice: intercountry adoption as child protection.

Here a quote from the article about an intercountry adoption conference recently held in Bulgaria:

Five years later things seem to be going back to where they were before the ratification of the Hague convention and before the European Commission’s criticisms. On 19 March an international conference on intercountry adoptions took place in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference was co-organised by the Ministry of Justice and the Association of accredited intercountry adoption agencies. There was very little information about the event, but apparently, children’s rights organisations were not present (and I am not even sure if the State Agency for Child Protection had any representatives - there was nothing about this conference on its website, which definitely means that none of its senior representatives has taken part in it). This must have left the field clear for the right type of discussion - unburdened by paraphernalia like children’s rights, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, or Bulgaria’s own Child Protection Act.

‘Brilliant’ results were reported at the conference - the number of intercountry adoptions is going up again. The information about the conference published by the English language weekly Sofia Echo shows a steep upward trend: “Compared to 2007 when there were 81 approvals from the Justice Minister for children’s adoptions, in 2008 there were 169.”** (By the way, the author of the article explains the official legislative position in Bulgaria that intercountry adoption should be a measure of last resort as a ‘patriotic concept’! If he ever bothers to read a relevant document on the rights of the child, he will be surprised to find out that international law in this area is premised on the same ‘patriotic concept’).

I also had been looking for information about that conference, and indeed it could not be found on the Bulgarian State Agency for Child Protection's website:

However, information on the conference was only available on the website of VESTA, where it is said that Bulgaria is 'Defrosting after ice age' (Bulgarian adoptions were as good as closed the last four years).

VESTA is the partner of one the biggest US agencies: HOLT International Children Services. They also facilitate All God's Children International, Three of Life and Gladney.

On Holt's Blog, in October 2008, the following can be read:

Wharfield and Smith also met with Bulgaria’s Deputy Minister of Justice. The attorney and CEO of Holt’s Bulgarian partner agency, Vesta, is currently working with the Ministry of Justice to draft a new family code that will amend the law favorably for adoption practices, including children with special needs.

So, here we have a US Adoption Agency working on the new family code in Bulgaria!

BULGARIA's CHILDREN: FOR EXPORT ONLY

Country Fee HOLT:

Depending on the country, fees for adopting healthy or minor special needs children are as follows:

Bulgaria $16,000
China $11,360
Ethiopia $9,690*
Haiti
$8,690
India $9,190*
Korea $17,215
Nepal $12,000
Philippines $9,890
Thailand $9,190*
Vietnam $10,325

MALAWI understands the intercountry adoption game

Congratulations for the Malawian judge who understood the risks and long term effects of celebrity adoptions.

NO MERCY FOR MADGE
By VIRGINIA WHEELER

Published: Today


POP queen MADONNA was "furious" today after a judge in Malawi sensationally denied her bid to adopt little MERCY.
Madonna was told she could not take the tot back with her to the US because the singer was not a permanent resident of Malawi.
Sources close to the star said she was "spitting blood" after the judge defied the Malawian government to deny the adoption.
But the judge launched a stinging attack on high profile celebrities flying in to poverty-stricken countries and adopting children.
The ruling said: “Put simply courts do make law by the process of precedence and Miss Madonna may not be the only international person interested in adopting the so-called poor children of Malawi.
“By removing the very safeguard that is supposed to protect our children the courts by their pronouncements could actively facilitate trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals who would take advantage of the weakness of the law of the land.
“Anyone could come to Malawi and quickly arrange an adoption that might have grave consequences on the very children that the law seeks to protect.
“Having considered this then, at the end of the day I must decline to grant the application for the adoption of the infant CJ.”

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Egypt: smuggling of children for adoption

Ethiopians condemn the sale of children for adoption

Last week Canadian CBC gave a voice to Canadian adoptive parent's concern about their Ethiopian children. Contrary to what was mentioned on the adoption papers, CBC documented that the children were no orphans.

Full article HERE

The (French) videos can be watched HERE

The Solidarity Committee for Ethiopian Political Prisoners is coming to the rescue of Ethopia's children. Today the below statement was published online:

March 22/2009
CONDEMN THE SALE OF CHILDREN UNDER THE COVER OF ADOPTION

The sale of Ethiopian children under the cover of adoption has now reached alarming proportions with more than 70 adoption agencies in action and the Ministry of women’s affairs and government backed middle men busy selling off children.

There are laws and regulations concerning adoption procedures in Ethiopia. These are not being observed at all. The official agencies engaged in the brazen sale of children are more or less all linked to the regime’s power holders (including Meles Zenawi) and documents are forged, evidence silenced and children given false identities and sold for the highest bidder. Ethiopian children are cheap to adopt (as compared to Russian and Cambodian ones) say many coming to adopt. The adoption racket involves not orphaned children only (of whom there are some 5 million) but children with parents who are sold off because the parents are poor. The child adopted by actress Angelina Jolie is not an orphan but with live parents who are Christian and not Moslem (and therefore the change of the child’s name to Zahra by her adoptive “mother” is improper). Many foreigners have adopted children who have parents after the authorities had informed them falsely that the children are orphans.

With thousands of Ethiopian children being sold off in their thousands at ten thousand dollars minimum per head the regime is reaping in millions. It is a profitable business that violates the rights of children and parents too. It is such a cruel undertaking that brothers and sisters have been separated and sold off for adoption to persons living in different countries. The waiting and investigation period prior to the adoption in accord with the law of Ethiopia is not observed at all. Thus, in Ethiopia now adoption is a racket, an illegal business and those who take part in it are abetting in the violation of the rights of children.

ORIGINAL TEXT HERE

Children of the World for Sale

Twenty years ago, a Dutch Member of Parliament drafted a report on the sale of children. Not much changed since then...

Anyone out there having the full report?


With courtesy to PPL

Children of the World for Sale - Where end of the line is for some
PETER SPINKS
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

December 16, 1987

Amsterdam - Along the seamy side streets of the Zeedijk, Amsterdam's notorious red-light district, money buys anything from a marijuana joint to a full-length pornographic video starring 10-year-old children.

"Everything is possible here," boasts a sex shop owner, explaining that the illegality of child porn does not deter its sale alongside adult movies. This, he says, is largely the result of police apathy and the roaring trade in sex tourism that it attracts.

"The presence of children of both sexes ready to satisfy the sexual appetites of organized tourist groups is very often an additional attraction," says Dutch Labor parliment member Piet Stoffelen. His recent report on the international trade in children links adoption, prostitution, pornography and slavery to the traffic in children from developing countries to the United States and Europe.

His report, based on the findings of Interpol, the Anti-Slavery Society, the International Labor Organization, various U.N.groups, adoption agencies and local newspaper reports, reveals that some governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia condone the illegal child trade.

"Their cash-strapped economies and the need for foreign currency often drive developing countries to become embroiled in international networks of intrigue surrounding child traffic abroad," Stoffelen says.

Adoptions for profit in Guatemala resulted in the export of 166 children between October 1981 and March 1986. Of these, 79 went to the United States, 27 to Belgium, 16 to Italy, 13 to Canada, 12 to Norway, eight to Sweden, six to West Germany and five to France. In February 1987, Guatemalan police discovered a nursery of 14 babies who had been sold before birth. Others were snatched by gangs of cut-throat dealers who got $50 each. The nursery owner, meanwhile, received $20,000 for each exported child.

The Horror Stories
Similar horror stories are reported from El Salvador, which exports hundreds of babies to the United States and Europe, especially Belgium, West Germany and France. Baby hunters are scavenging in villages, refugee camps and the slum quarters of towns. According to official Salvadoran information: "The economic demand for children for adoption causes not only illegal trade and fraud, but also the counterfeiting of documents and the abduction of children."

Stoffelen says, "The adoptable child is, bluntly speaking, a commercial object commanding five-figure prices. In such circumstances, the interests of the children are not even of secondary consideration. The profit motive leads to many parents selling their kids for adoption. Pregnant mothers are persuaded to sign away their future babies in exchange for a few weeks' food and shelter in the immediate prenatal period."

The report paints a similarly dismal picture of the sexual exploitation of children. Studies by a French children's organization estimated that there are about 5,000 boys and 3,000 girls working as prostitutes in Paris. About 300,000 boys do so in the United States and - while officially classified as runaways - a proportion of the 15,000 juveniles reported missing in Britain each year become prostitutes. Part of the reason is that the prices for sex with children are up to five times higher than the adult rate.

Quoting a conference of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, the Stoffelen report notes that the prostitutes most in demand in Latin America are between the ages of 10 and 14: "Depending on her physique and the services which she is able to provide, a girl of 12 can earn as much as $500 a month, which is more than 10 times the amount an adult can earn by working all day long in a factory. Once a girl of 12 or 13 has earned so much money, there is little hope that she will give up prostitution . . . Over the years the prostitution of minors has become an industry, one from which many families make their entire living."

A similar scenario emerges for Hong Kong and Bangkok, where girl children are handed over for the equivalent of a few U.S. dollars to a pimp and soon find themselves locked into prostitution. Macao girls bought for $100 to $200 are worth 40 times as much on reaching the United States.

Despite the paucity of direct police evidence that children from developing countries, in particular, are sold in Europe and the United States for the explicit purpose of prostitution and pornography, Stoffelen says local newspaper reports suggest this is quite common. "Children are often bought from desperate, impoverished parents by false adopters who offer a better life abroad. They are also kidnapped and sold to middlemen who ship them abroad."

A typical report is that in which a Bolivian lawyer was accused of having paid kidnappers $40 for a boy whom he sold to a Belgian couple for $10,000. Such cases occur frequently, the report suggests; it claims many adoption rings and aid agencies operate as covers for the traffic. Occasionally this involves professionals - like the doctor who informed new mothers that their babies were stillborn while he was selling them to an adoption racket.

Disguised traffic involves the hiring of women or girls to work away from home in the entertainment industry as dancers, cabaret artists and bartenders. On comming into contact with prostitutes and pimps they often get involved themselves. Others are forced into prostitution to repay debts to the employment agency which paid their travel from developing countries and found them jobs in the United States and Europe. As strangers in a foreign land they seldom know their rights or to whom the y can turn.

Prostitution in West
Others are hired explicitly for prostitution in the West. According to Interpol sources, they are supplied along recognized routes - sometimes secretly, sometimes through established covers. "Few countries, with the possible exception of some with planned economies, are free of the international traffic," Stoffelen says.

"But it is not confined simply to a flow from the less developed to the more developed countries. It would be more accurate to say that the movement involves the traffic of poor women toward rich men, in all directions."

In any event, the flow is aided and abetted by the international "escort" agencies operating not merely in European cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Hamburg, Paris, Marseilles and New York, but also in Bombay, Macao, Singapore and Mexico City. Local contact bureaus arrange meetings in these countries, while inter-country contacts are made through international "marriage travel agencies."

Menger's Travels, an agency operating in West Germany, advertised the delights of "gentle, tender and faithful" girls from Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines, until it was exposed. It guaranteed marriage within a year for German clients.

Clients of another agency offering similar services, the German Interpart Company, chose women from a catalog of photographs and reputedly paid the bureau $5,000 for a return ticket to Bangkok plus accommodation in a hotel, in order to visit their chosen partners. If a marriage were arranged, a further sum had to be paid to the company.

The report says that the kind of organized child prostitution usually associated with some urban areas of Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, also exists in Latin America, especially in Brazil and Peru. African tourist resorts - such as Hammamet, Djerba, Abidjan and Dakar - exploit young African boys as shamelessly as their Thai counterparts treat young masseuses.

And a recent report by Terre des Hommes has highlighted the prostitution of small boys in Sri Lanka, where about 2,000 work in the capital, Colombo. "Pimps and procurers play the most important role in supplying young girls to the customers, by providing false identities for them," Stoffelen says. "For false identities to function, official bureaucracy and police authorities must collaborate at some stage with pimps."

Market for Pornography
The market for video pornography with children is also thought to function with at least the knowledge of many government officials. Even in the Netherlands, where controls on the abuse of Dutch children may be expected to be tighter, a recent scandal involving children used for pornography in the staunchly Calvinist village of Oude Pekala suggested local knowledge. The problem is also growing in Third World oil-producing countries, which have taken a leaf out of Amsterdam's homosexual guides, which contain addresses, hotels, rates, local agents and the allowable legal limits.

Other forms of child trade mentioned in the report include the purchase of children aged 10-15 from gypsy families in the South Serbia, Macedonia and Kosova areas of South Yugoslavia for about $30, for sale to gangs in Italy for about $7,500. After being taught the skills of theft and prostitution, the children earn many times their price. Those refusing to work are beaten, or chained for days without food or drink.

"There are so many varieties of child trade that a simple solution does not exist," Stoffelen says. "If one really wants to solve the problems involved there must be better and more development aid, improvement of education, and policies to eradicate social and economic misery in specific areas and towns. Poverty is no doubt the most important cause of the problem."

His report suggests the trade can be curbed, however, through new laws and tighter policing of existing legislation. These recommendations are under consideration by the 21-nation Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

"It's a long road ahead, but we must take it," Stoffelen says. "In a free market economy, where price determines virtually everything, it is inevitable that trade of this sort flourishes. But that should not deter our efforts to legislate against one of the most undesirable forms of trade known to man."

Meet the Parents

Another Indian family desperately looking for their child. This time Mother Jones traced the child in the United States:

Meet the Parents: The Dark Side of Overseas Adoption

A Midwestern kid's family believes his birth parents put him up for adoption. An Indian couple claim he was kidnapped from them and sold. Who's right?
—By Scott Carney














—Photo: Scott Carney


March/April 2009
After hours hunched behind the wheel of a rented Kia, flying past cornfields and small-town churches, I'm parked on a Midwestern street, trying not to look conspicuous. Across the way, a preteen boy dressed in silver athletic shorts and a football T-shirt plays with a stick in his front yard. My heart thumps painfully. I wonder if I'm ready to change his life forever.

For the full article CLICK HERE

MORE INFORMATION: VISIT THE AUTHOR's WEBSITE