~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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Pact signed to thwart illegal adoption trade

HANOI - Vietnam and France have signed an agreement on child adoption, signalling the end of a French suspension of Vietnamese adoptions imposed last year amid fears that lax administration was fuelling the illegal trade in children. Until the ban was imposed last May, France was accepting about 1,400 Vietnamese children each year - representing about half of all foreign children adopted annually by French couples.

Paris suspended adoptions in Vietnam after a French Foreign Ministry probe and local media reports revealed that corrupt officials were making huge profits from selling children to foreigners. Those officials were reportedly making large sums of money by selling "legitimate" paperwork to child-trafficking rings, which then sold children to foreign couples for as much as US$5,000 (HK$39,000).

In one trial of members of a child-trafficking ring centred in northern Ninh Binh province, the court heard that 105 fake adoption papers had been used to sell 371 children over a three-year period. According to child welfare agencies, the huge profits to be made had also prompted an undetermined number of women to become pregnant specifically to sell their newborn infants to foreigners.

A member of Unicef's family welfare and child protection section said despite the French decision to suspend adoptions pending a review of procedures, couples from the United States, Australia and Israel continued to travel to Vietnam in search of children to adopt. But he said recent legislative and administrative changes meant the potential for abuse of the system had been significantly reduced. "Traffickers of children now face life in prison and prosecution has been made easier by changes to procedures," he said.

An official at the French Embassy in Hanoi said the agreement defining new adoption procedures between Vietnam and France had been signed late last month, but had still to be ratified by Paris. He said French ratification would "take some months" but the authorities were confident that the centralised control implemented by Vietnamese authorities allowed better supervision of adoptions.

By Huw Watkin - South China Morning Post - February 14, 2000.