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.
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