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The Magistrate held them guilty under Section 420 and 471 of the IPC relating to cheating and forging of documents respectively. In addition to the sentence, they have been asked to pay a fine of Rs. 1,000 each. The Magistrate said that he had taken a lenient view in awarding the sentence as they belonged to a religious organisation.

Sister Innamma, Provincial Superior of J.M.J. Provincialate, was the only one to be acquitted. The nine others of the home who were convicted were Sister Shoureelu, Head Mistress, St. Teresa Girls High School, Nagothu Rojalu, Head Mistress, St. Joseph's Convent, Gajwel, Vijaya Kumari, accountant, T. Vani, savings co-coordinator, N. Narsamma and L. Sangeetha, record assistants, P. Latha and J. Suguna, cluster coordinators, and R. Nirmala, former employee. Two others — Padmaja, a former employee, and Deepa — were absconding.

Soon after the adoption scandal broke out, a CID enquiry was ordered and a charge sheet filed in the court, naming 13 persons. Cases were booked under various sections of the IPC.

An FIR was lodged with Sanjeeva Reddy Nagar police station as the home was located in its jurisdiction. It was a long trial and about 100 witnesses were examined.

THE arrest in Chennai on May 3, 2005, of five kidnappers, who have sold over 350 children to an adoption agency in the city over many years; the inquiry ordered by the Delhi government into the process of inter-country adoptions in 10 agencies in the Capital; and the recent moves in Andhra Pradesh to book Shalini Misra, a former Director of the Women Development and Child Welfare Department, who had cracked the adoption racket in the State in 1999, under the SC/ST Atrocities Prevention Act, have blown the lid off a massive adoption racket in the country. Trade in inter-country adoptions, in particular, appears to be a "roaring business" for some unscrupulous agencies.

In 1999, the country was shocked by the revelation of an inter-country adoption racket in Andhra Pradesh when S. Peter Subbiah of Good Samaritan Evangelical Social Welfare Association was found buying and selling babies. Around the same time, similar stories emerged from Tamil Nadu's Salem district, from where the police arrested five persons on complaints of stealing four babies from the government hospital. The babies were found in an adoption agency in Chennai. The commodification of children should have ended with such revelations. But it has not.

Frontline investigation and the documents obtained in the process show that such revelations are only the tip of the iceberg. With some exceptions, inter-country adoption is a can of worms. Some unscrupulous agencies have made India an international baby shopping centre.

Papers are forged and guidelines violated as babies are matched rapidly with foreign parents. Touts of private adoption agencies hunt for vulnerable families. Often, the mother has little negotiating power. For as little as Rs.150-500, a new-born is handed over to touts who are paid about Rs.6,000 a baby by the agencies. Mothers who go to reclaim their babies are turned away. Some agencies look the other way from the trafficking, stealing, and buying of babies.

Children are sold abroad by providing false information about them, falsifying documents, and making use of loopholes in the adoption guidelines prescribed by the Supreme Court. Some agencies also make bargain offers to adoptive parents for the wholesale purchase of babies; while some others seem to blackmail those who refuse to increase the purchase price of babies. Western placement agencies collect payment far in excess of the actual adoption costs, routing a portion of this to the Indian adoption agency.

While only an estimated 15-20 per cent of adoption agencies seem to indulge in the racket, the gravity of the situation must not be underestimated. There is an urgent need to restructure and reform the system of adoption in India.

Inter-country adoption (ICA), which began primarily as an ad hoc humanitarian response to children orphaned by the Second World War, who could not find a family to care for them in their own country, is now a complex social phenomena that has lent itself to serious abuse. It is substantially commercialised. Several intermediaries have turned it into a profitable business indulging in fraud and illegal and unethical practices. In such cases, the total disregard for the children being adopted turns them to mere commodities.

Globally, over the past three decades, 2,65,677 babies, most of them from 10 countries - China, Russia, India, Ukraine, Vietnam, Romania, S. Korea, Cambodia, Gautemala and Kazakhstan - have been placed in ICA. These adoptions have risen from about 9,000 in 1992 to over 20,000 in 2002. Among the sending countries, India holds a prominent position. The United States ranks first among the receiving nations, accounting for over half of all ICAs worldwide. ICAs from developing countries happen primarily with the demand for children increasing in developed countries and the supply rising commensurately from the developing countries.

The demand for children increases in developed countries owing to fertility declines, the greater availability of contraceptive aids, the legalisation of abortion, higher participation of women in the workforce, the rise in the age of marriage, the postponement of childbirth and state support for single mothers. The supply rises in the developing countries owing to an increasing number of orphaned and abandoned children because of poor and worsening socio-economic conditions. According to Hyderabad-based Gita Ramaswamy, who has done extensive research on adoptions in India, the process now represents in many ways the convergence of demand and supply. "To cut the going global rate of $22,000-$25,000 per child, international adopters come to India to shop for babies, available at a fourth of this price," she says.

As many as 255 foreign adoption agencies (of which 131 are government bodies) and 74 Indian placement agencies are recognised by the Government of India for ICA. There is no legislation that covers inter-country adoption. There are only rules laid down by the Supreme Court in a series of judgments, most notably the 1984 case of Laxmikant Pandey v. Union of India. The Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA), set up by the government in the wake of this judgment, implements and monitors ICA; it is also the nodal agency in respect of adoption in India. According to the Supreme Court judgment, CARA is expected to act as a "clearing house of information" related to children available for ICA.

Voluntary Coordinating Agencies (VCAs) in the States are supposed to ensure that children are first offered for Indian adoption (in line with the Supreme Court guidelines) and if this fails to happen within a stipulated timeframe, clear the children to CARA for inter-country adoption. No agency in India can proceed with ICA without a `no objection certificate' from CARA. There are several checks and balances to ensure that inter-country adoptions are done in the best interest of the child.

However, in addition to the loopholes in the CARA rules that are exploited with impunity, there is a nexus among agencies, middlemen, and the authorities that makes a mockery of the rules. While adoption has certainly benefited thousands of Indian children and parents, and is done with a lot of care and passion by some agencies, many institutions violate the child's most basic rights in the pursuit of money.

A series of scandals uncovered in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu over the past few years is finally laying bare the inter-country adoption network throughout the country.

"Inter-country Adoption", an international study by the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) research institute, International Child Development Centre in Florence, Italy, is one of the most extensive pieces of research on the subject. It brings into the open the "large-scale abuses of the spirit and procedures of inter-country adoptions." According to the study: "During the adoption process, violations of the most basic rights of the child can occur. These violations are often perpetrated under the cover of the supposedly humanitarian aim of the act and `justified' by the simplistic view that the child will somehow always be `better off' in a rich country. Illegal acts and malpractice involve criminal networks, intermediaries of all kinds, and couples prepared to carry out, to be accomplice to, tolerate, or simply ignore abuses in order to secure an adoption. The diversity of the methods used and the range of actors demonstrate the complexity of the task of protecting the rights of the child in inter-country adoption. The challenge is greater in that in many, if not most, cases the resulting adoption bears all the hallmarks of a perfectly legal procedure."

The UNICEF report points to a number of ways in which inter-country adoption is abused using illegal, unethical, and clandestine methods. Frontline investigation shows that all these methods are practised by some agencies in India doing flourishing business in ICAs:

Obtaining children illegally

*Abducting babies by a variety of methods, including organised kidnapping as is clear from the Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh experience.

*Identifying vulnerable mothers — from poor families, unwed or single — and enticing them to give up their babies. The pressure may be exerted before the birth, at the maternity clinic or hospital, or in the adoption agency, which may house the mother till delivery. Such pressure is also reinforced by free pre- and post-natal care. For example, a children's home in a Chennai suburb runs a short-stay home for deserted, destitute and abandoned women. It takes particular interest in rehabilitating unwed mothers who give away their children in adoption.

*Falsely informing the mother that her baby was stillborn or died shortly after birth so as to spirit away the infant. For example, agencies operate from within the hospital premises in New Delhi, according to the findings of an inquiry conducted by the Delhi government of 10 agencies.

*Buying children from poor families, for example, from the Lambada tribes in Andhra Pradesh.

*Accepting financial or material rewards for the adoption agency in exchange for children. This seems a common practice among some agencies, as is clear from the letters sent to Indian officials by foreign adopters. In fact, an adoption agency in Chennai admits that the money got from foreign adoptions pays for the maintenance of the institution, and also the orphanage/school it runs.

*Offering women financial incentives to conceive a child specifically for adoption abroad and luring poor women to sell their babies.

Such instances were reported among the Lambada tribe of Andhra Pradesh. Says Shalini Misra, former director, in the Andhra Pradesh Women Development and Child Welfare Department, who shut down many agencies that prepared children for overseas adoptions in Hyderabad after a scandal broke out in 2001: "I saw a chain of agents luring the Lambada tribal women when they were pregnant." The agents said: "If it's a male child, you keep it, no problem; but if it's a girl, you won't be able to keep her because of your poverty, so give her to us and we will take care of her and give you money." Middlemen routinely lied. Mothers were told that they could visit regularly, that their children would be given an education and a chance to move up in society. But actually, the children were to be sent overseas. "This practice was widespread, allowing Hyderabad adoption agencies to amass substantial illicit funds," she said. According to Shalini Misra, American parents paid Rs.500,000 to Rs.2.5 million to adopt a child purchased from tribal families for a meagre amount.

*Providing misleading information to the biological parent(s) on the consequences of adoption to obtain their consent. This includes assuring them, or allowing them to believe, that they will be able to maintain links with, or receive news of, the child after adoption.

*Providing false information to prospective adopters. The U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs, for instance, cautions that one of the most common adoption frauds involves intermediaries who offer a supposedly healthy child for adoption knowing that the child is seriously ill. This is revealed by letters from parents who had adopted from some agencies in India.

Illegally securing permission to adopt

*Falsifying, or falsely obtaining "free for adoption" certificate from the appropriate authorities using loopholes in the rules. According to former CARA Chairperson and honorary general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Indian Council for Child Welfare Andal Damodaran, routine checks at an adoption agency in Coimbatore revealed that it was using loopholes such as falsely matching siblings in order to send children abroad.

*The "child relinquishing letters" supposed to be given by the biological parents or guardians seem to have been signed by the same person, faked, or not signed at all. Yet the magistrates authorised to certify the letter seem to have counter-signed the certificate. This was found in some agencies in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

*Collusion of officials to help agencies with inter-country adoptions.

For example, a Coimbatore adoption agency was hurriedly issued a licence in 2003 without following the mandated procedure of it being registered with the Department of Social Welfare for a minimum of three years. The inspection report of CARA, after the agency's licence expired last year, revealed enormous deficiencies in the operations of the institution.

The agency, at the time of CARA inspection on October 6, 2002, had a 13-day-old baby with no records. The authorities also observed that the institution had not made enough effort to identify the Indian parents. However, the institution was given an inter-country adoption licence on June 19, 2003; an application was even made to CARA for recognising the agency to operate as the second VCA in Tamil Nadu, supported by officials in the Department of Social Welfare.

This apart, despite the July 2, 2004 CARA inspection report that says that the agency has indulged in "unethical practices" and its "registration is not proper," its ICA licence was renewed last month. The report also points to most children from the agency being sent to one Washington-based agency, International Families Incorporated, whose executive director is Mrudula Rao, mother of the treasurer of the Indian agency. E. Ramana Rao, the treasurer's father, has donated "most of the funds to the agency," which is an "unethical practice," the report observes.

Circumventing the adoption process

*In some cases, relatives or `fake' mothers signed away a child they were temporarily caring for, pretending to be the biological parents.

*In some cases, the biological mother and the adoptive parents actively collude: The former registers in hospital in the adoptive mother's name or assigns paternity to the prospective adoptive father. In such a case the official act of adoption is eliminated altogether.

In several places, the government's `children homes' are run by adoption agencies. For instance, the children's home in Sambajinagar (Maharashtra) is run by a Pune-based adoption agency. In early 2004, when a team of health workers from the Municipal Corporation went there for a surprise check, it was not allowed entry. However, after government intervention, when it finally managed to get in, the team found children to be in poor health; many of them were malnourished and polio-affected (10 out of 66; Daily Samana, January 5, 2004). This raises an important question: Why is the government letting adoption agencies run children's homes?

According to researcher Gita Ramaswamy, "a multi-billion dollar international adoption industry is getting exposed." According to her, for many agencies inter-country adoption is the bread and butter. They adopt various means to circumvent the rules, aided by some unscrupulous officials.

Using loopholes in CARA guidelines

CARA guidelines insist that "at least half of all adoptions done by any agency that is recognised for ICA should be in-country," and that "only after the VCA is unable to place the baby in the country within 30 days and clears the baby for inter-country adoption can the agencies place the baby in adoption outside the country after obtaining an NoC from CARA." But significantly, the guideline exempts from this procedure siblings, special-needs children, and children over six. This is the loophole most abused. However, many Indian adopters now are also asking for siblings and special-needs children.

There have been instances of agencies bringing together unrelated children and declaring them siblings. This helps agencies not only get past the VCA but also earn double for placing two children in adoption. They also get around the "at least 50 per cent in-country adoption" rule.

Most times, the period of 60 days stipulated earlier (it is now reduced to 30) is not sufficient for the VCA to locate an Indian adopter and, almost by default, the child is given clearance for inter-country adoption. Agencies also manage to force the VCA into situations where it has no choice but to clear normal babies for inter-country adoption. According to former Tamil Nadu VCA member Vidya Reddy, agencies plan and co-ordinate their application for clearance at the same time so that the VCA is inundated with proposals. With inadequate time and staff, the VCA finds it difficult to locate Indian adopters within the stipulated time.

According to Andal Damodaran in "Adoption in India — Past, Present and Future," a paper presented at an International Conference on Adoption in Adelaide, April 2004, although the guidelines of the Supreme Court and CARA provide a number of safeguards, "we are constantly faced with deviations, which flout various ethical principles including the adoptability of the child, costs and short-cutting of procedures."

Follow-up reports of children placed in adoption for the mandated period after adoption are rarely done. According to Gita Ramaswamy, while in some cases there is close mandated scrutiny by courts, by and large they have become a mere `rubber-stamping' institution.

Says Andal Damodaran in her conference paper: "Often, there seems to be lacunae in the preparation of the child and prospective adoptive parents. The history of the child is not fully recorded. In many cases the prospective adoptive parents are not counselled adequately on the likely difficulties they may encounter." She adds: "Market tactics are often used to deal with adoption. The `supply' rises to meet `demand', there is `highest bidding', `retainer fees', `expected annual turnover' and so on contrary to the child-centric objective of adoption."

According to Vidya Reddy, agencies invariably view the procedures for getting "abandoned" certificate (as opposed to "surrender" documents) as cumbersome paperwork. Most times, the documents are forged or gone through in haste. Gita Ramaswamy agrees, pointing out that in Andhra Pradesh government officials and their apparatus were aiding these agencies; instead of questioning infringements of procedures, they turn a blind eye or collude in the questionable practices in some cases. She says that institutions such as the VCA and CARA, in a way, failed to perform their duties. Activists also accuse CARA of giving clearances mechanically, despite having access to all the documents.

Ironically, in Andhra Pradesh, a charge-sheet has been filed against a former VCA Secretary for alleged involvement in the adoption racket. And the Indian Council of Social Welfare, which was also found guilty of a number of adoption malpractices by the State government, which investigated the adoption racket in 2000, was one of the scrutinising agencies for ICA. The scrutinising agency examines the application for guardianship made on behalf of the foreign parents; now Indian parents are also scrutinised.

Activists such as Gita Ramaswamy demand a thorough revamp of the complex adoption process to make it transparent and child-centric. She regrets that even the legal system has failed to pull up the offending placement agencies. The court-appointed scrutinising agency overlooked obvious breach of procedural regulations, while family courts passed orders without scrutinising the documents. She says: "In the entire system there was no one actually speaking for the child. Most are focussed on getting the child out of the country in the quickest possible time. Many foreign adopters have mentioned this (the quickness of the process) as their reason for choosing India to adopt a child."

According to Andal Damodaran, there are the honourable exceptions throughout the country. One is the Chennai-based Bala Mandir that has been working as a juvenile home and orphanage from the 1950s. The majority of children here are not free for adoption. According to a social worker, most children in Bala Mandir have one parent, a grandparent, aunt, or some relative, with whom the child has a bond. Only in rare cases of abandonment and even rarer cases of surrender do children become available for adoption here. In fact, according to Sujata Mody, who has done extensive research on adoption in Chennai, "Bala Mandir comes closest to being a model adoption agency."

Money involved in inter-country adoptions

There is no doubting that a great deal of money is to be made in ICA. While CARA stipulates that a maximum of Rs.100 a day for a maximum period of six months (Rs.18,000) can be paid by foreign adopters to the Indian agency, in reality agencies charge a hefty "India fee" that ranges from $3,000 to $5,000; the fees charged by big agencies start from $15,000. (The agencies' foreign partners collect them on their behalf.) This `India fee' is on top of costs such as agency fees, home study preparation, immigration fees, post-placement visits, assistance with paperwork, legal fees, and so on, and is openly stated in Internet advertisements.

Foreign adopters carry substantial cash to India to pay the agency. Frances Abbott, in her book, My Gifts from India, records how she was fleeced at every stage even by lawyers and middlemen when she came to India from the U.S. to adopt a child.

The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, which surveyed more than 1,600 American families that adopted internationally (including from India) through U.S. agencies, found that 75 per cent of them were asked by their agencies to carry at least $3,000 to their adoptive child's country of origin to pay "adoption service fees." Some 11 per cent of the respondents stated that when they were abroad, agencies asked them to pay additional fees or donations covertly; 15 per cent reported that their agency withheld information or gave them inaccurate information about the child; 15 per cent said their agency withheld information or gave them inaccurate information about the adoption process; and 14 per cent said their adoption cost exceeded what they were told at the start (testimony of Cindy Freidmutter, Executive Director, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute on "International Adoptions: Problems and Solutions" before the House Committee on International Relations, May 22, 2002, which can be read at www.adoptioninstitute.org.

When asked about the high charges and donations, Preet Mandir (Pune) director J. Bhasin said: "The government stipulates Rs.24,000 for Indian and $700-900 for foreign adoptions. This is not adequate to run large institutions such as ours. We run only on grants and donations. If parents cannot afford it, we don't ask them for donations, but if they can, they give as much as they want. We don't demand it."

CARA Chairperson Aloma Lobo finds this totally unacceptable: "Maintenance cost is like dowry. Agencies cannot run on donations. They should have a corpus of their own; otherwise they should not be in the business of service." According to her, adoption should not be a money-making venture; it should be part of a larger child welfare programme. "This has to be regulated. I am trying to do something about it."

Is adoption only for the rich?

In the existing set-up, no ordinary childless working class family can afford to adopt. According to the study "Adoption Agencies and Institutional Practices in Tamil Nadu: A Sociological Study" by Sujata Mody of the Chennai-based Malarchi Women's Resource Centre, one adoption agency head in Tamil Nadu said: "It is the privilege of the elite." Some agencies in Tamil Nadu admit that they need money to run the home, so they need to "charge suitably." Even those agencies that charge only nominal legal, maintenance and registration fees do not consider skilled manual workers worthy "adopters." There are, according to Vidya Reddy, a large number of people who are turned away on frivolous grounds.

In the wake of the December 26, 2004, tsunami, the issue of adoption has acquired another dimension with an outpouring of solidarity and generosity from India and abroad. This brings with it clear risks for the orphaned children and the relevant communities. It can open up a Pandora's box. Adoption can be one of the options, provided the safety and welfare of the child can be absolutely guaranteed. There should certainly not be any dilution of the adoption rules. This is particularly important considering the trafficking of children under the guise of adoption. Evidence is pouring in from all tsunami-affected countries of child trafficking.

Some 60 child rights organisations have called for a year-long ban on adoption of children affected by the tsunami, as Gujarat did after the Bhuj earthquake. The options, the child rights activists say, for the orphaned children should be sensitive, kind, humane and, most important, child-centric, addressing the short- and long-term consequences as they have suffered enough. Realising the problems, the Tamil Nadu government has wisely decided not to entertain any adoption of the tsunami-affected children.

While several agencies do strictly child-centric placements, it is the malpractice of an influential section that brings adoption into disrepute. Why is CARA not taking action against the erring agencies? Says Aloma Lobo: "If CARA finds an agency flouting rules, it can only delicense that agency, not arrest the people involved." According to her, CARA has the powers only to initiate investigation.

Adoption, as it is now practised, raises a set of questions: Who is responsible for the sham of ICAs? What is the role of CARA, the VCA and the State governments? Why is the Centre silent on this?

Unless the government intervenes, adoption — largely a social welfare measure - could be swayed by market forces and reduce growing numbers of children to commodities.

The city police had been getting a number of complaints regarding missing children over the past few years. They got a breakthrough after they nabbed the main culprits, Varadharajan, 51, of Otteri, and Sheik Dawood, 42, of Korukkupet. The duo used to kidnap children mainly from slum areas.

A child missing complaint was registered with the Otteri police station on December 17, 1998, by Noorullah of Otteri. The complainant, on Tuesday passed on a vital information about the abduction of his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Fathimma, to the police. He said the baby was abducted by Varadharajan and Sheik Dawood.

The police swung into action and picked up Varadharajan, Sheik Dawood and their aides Sabeetha, 55, of Pulianthopu, Navjeen, 32, of Korukkupet and Manoharan, 49, of T P Chathiram. On further investigation, the police found that the same gang had also kidnapped the three-and-a-half-year-old daughter of Sabeen of Old Vannarapet and the two-and half-year-old daughter of Kathirvelu of Pulianthoppu.

According to the police, these children were sold to an adoption centre for prices ranging from Rs 25,000 to Rs 50,000 and they were later adopted by both Indians and foreigners. Explaining the modus operandi, the police said the gang members identified the kids first and then they slept on the platforms close to their houses posing as beggars. They carried off the children when everybody was asleep.

The adoption centre workers also had a role in this, the police said and added that the gang had been operating for nearly 15 years. They even used to steal children from maternity wards of Government General Hospitals, the police sources said.

Investigation is on to find out the whereabouts of these kidnapped children. Around 350 children could have been sold to the centre by this gang, they said and added that it would be difficult to trace these children as they would be anywhere between 10 and 15 years of age by now. The adoption centre had also taken money from the adopting parents, they added.

However, the police said no case had been registered against 'Malaysian Social Service', the adoption centre as of now and nobody had been picked up from there.

She has come all the way from her temporary shelter in a Tsunami colony to find out the state of her children. The agency had promised her they would return to her when they attained the age of 18, by which time they would have got good 'education' in a German School.

Declah is now scared. She even feels that her children would never ever return. They might have been given away in adoption without her knowledge, she apprehends. She is overcome by despair and fumbles for words while wondering whether her two children are the property of some strangers in a strange country.

Actually, she had entrusted all her four children to the care of the Malaysian Social Service way back in 1998. But two of them, one, 10 years old another nine years, returned after six months.

"Ravindranath, director of the agency, told me that two of my children could not adjust themselves with the climate over there and so they were sent back," Declah told this website's newspaper.

She said she used to regularly visit the agency office at Thiruverkadu and Ravindranath would give her pictures of her children that he had received through e-mail.

"I was also paid Rs.1000 for the first few months and told me that the amount was the stipend the children got from their school in Germany, but it was stopped after a few months...in fact, for the last couple of years, I was not even allowed to enter the office, nor could I meet Ravindranath. And I had no direct contact with my kids in Germany..."

She has become very nervous after the busting of the racket and the arrest of the key figures behind the agency. Clutching at some old photographs of her two children, Declah was waiting outside the Central Crime Branch (CCB) office on Monday.

She was not even sure whether to register a complaint with the CCB authorities. "I only want information on the situation of my kids. I trusted Ravindranath implicitly in the past, but now I don't know what to do. What if my filing a complaint creates more problems for my children?" she asked.

According to CCB sources, this story of Delclah added a new dimension to the adoption racket case. CCB has got confessional statements from the accused on abduction and "selling away" in the guise of adoption, but the apparent confidence trick played on the likes of Declah was a different story altogether. "We'll investigate deeply and see what can be done," said a senior police official.

“The Romanian Government was told by the European Union to ban inter-country adoptions as the price for membership, and they capitulated. That the EU should demand such a policy is appalling. That the Romanians should accept it is equally troubling.” said Commission Chairman Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS). “Romania has denied thousands of children a loving home and a caring family, and the EU is at fault for letting politics get in the way of helping children.”

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission, is a U.S. Government agency that monitors progress in the implementation of the provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The Commission consists of nine members from the United States Senate, nine from the House of Representatives, and one member each from the Departments of State, Defense and Commerce.

“The law is based upon the misguided proposition that an institution, or even a foster family, is preferable to an adoptive family from outside the child’s country of birth,” said Commission Co-Chairman Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ). “Each year, 1,000 children are adopted domestically while 8,000 children in Romania are being sentenced to a life without knowing family or a parent’s love. This is undeniably a human rights abuse.”

Prior to enactment of the 2004 anti-adoption law, approximately 1,700 adoption cases were pending with the Romanian Government. Of these, 200 children have been matched with adoptive parents in the United States, and the remainder with parents in Western Europe. Currently, despite promises from the Romanian Government, including President Basescu, none of these “pipeline cases” have been resolved.

“This new Romanian law could very well harm the safety of children. My heart goes out to the children and families who have been caught up in this troubling new law,” said Commission Ranking Member, Rep. Ben Cardin (D-MD).

“You can be sympathetic with Romania’s need to join the European Union and still recognize that these adoption laws are deeply damaging to the lives of thousands of children,” added Senator Brownback. “There has to be a better and more humane way to deal with this problem and I urge the EU and Romania to sit down and take seriously the fate of thousands of innocent children and loving families.”

In October 2000, less than four months after arriving in County Armagh, one of the boys died in the care of his adoptive parents Gwen and Geoffrey Briggs — his tiny body covered in multiple fractures.

Two weeks after the death of David Briggs, his brother Samuel was brought to hospital with a fractured skull. Geoffrey Briggs had punched the child for refusing to take some medicine.

Briggs was subsequently jailed for grievous bodily harm for the attack on Samuel. No-one has ever faced charges over David.

The Briggs have since left Northern Ireland but Spotlight tracked them down to their new home in Scotland.

A special investigation by the programme, shown on Tuesday, revealed the children were not orphans and have a mother in Romania who claims the twins — real names David and Samuel Filipache — were internationally adopted without her knowledge or consent.

The twins were not orphans and have seven siblings

Mrs Filipache and her husband, who have been together for 23 years, have seven other children — the older and younger brothers and sisters of the twins.

Spotlight's production team in Romania tracked down the family and found that no-one had ever told them of the fate of David and Samuel, despite the information being available on the internet.

The mother said she believed the twins were in a children's home in Slobozia, about an hour's drive away from her village, and she was unaware they had left Romania.

Despite her distress at the news of David's death, which was broken privately to the mother by the production team, Mrs Filipache said she was thankful to know what had happened to the twins who, she says, were thought about and talked about in her family every day.

Mrs Filipache told Spotlight she believed David's body should be returned to Romania for burial in his homeland.

She also had this to say about Briggs' assault on Samuel: "I am a religious person and I am not allowed to put revenge in someone, but I hope that God will punish him."

The close-knit Filipache family are Roma gypsies and live in grinding poverty in a village several hours' journey from the Romanian capital Bucharest.

They share one room in a relative's house which has had no electricity, running water or furniture since their own home collapsed in a storm last year.

The local child protection authorities in Slobozia say they took the children into care because of the living conditions of the family at the time.

Mrs Filipache was never told about the fate of David and Samuel

They were unable to specify what assistance had been offered to the Filipaches to help them keep the twins.

Under Romanian law at the time, international adoption was supposed to be the last resort for children who were taken into care after other possibilities like reintegration into the family, fostering or domestic adoption were exhausted.

Although the adoption consent for the Filipache twins was signed only a week after an emergency care order was enforced, officials stressed the process was entirely legal and that the paperwork was signed in the presence of a public notary.

Their legal spokesman Badea Nicolae said: "The mother agreed for the children to be put into the institution because it was actually impossible for her to bring up seven children."

They made me sign something, but God knows what I signed

Mrs Filipache, whom the authorities acknowledge is barely literate, claimed she thought she was signing a form to renounce any family allowance from the government for the twins.

"They never told me anything, and they wouldn't tell me for fear I might send them to jail. They made me sign something, but God knows what I signed," she said.

"These people should have asked me if I wanted them to have a better life, to be brought up by someone else.

"I as a mother, I had the right to know and to give my consent. They shouldn't have sold my children as Judas sold Jesus."

Spotlight learned that the Briggs paid $24,000 for the adoption process. There is no suggestion that the Romanian child protection authorities in Slobozia or the Filipache family, received any money.

Badea Nicolae said of the money: "We are surprised to hear about that. The law forbids us to receive money for these things.

"Maybe the adoptive family can tell you better because they know to whom they paid the money."

A private Romanian adoption agency based in Bucharest which was used by the Briggs could not be reached for comment.

Errors

A series of errors compounded the tragedy surrounding the twins.

The Assistant State Pathologist for Northern Ireland, Dr Michael Curtis, failed to examine X-rays which showed multiple fractures on David's body when he carried out an initial post-mortem.

Although he was cleared of serious professional misconduct when he appeared in front of the General Medical Council, he is currently facing internal disciplinary proceedings.

Last month, the Briggs family's health visitor appeared before a nurse's disciplinary committee on charges of misconduct, failing to keep proper records and falsifying records. The outcome is still awaited. Claire McDonnell denies the charges.

A report commissioned by the Department of Health and published last September was highly critical of the Craigavon and Banbridge Community Trust which was responsible for monitoring the Briggs.

Romania banned international adoptions in 2001 amid allegations of corruption in the system.

Alexandra Austin, 23, said she was returned to her birth parents in Romania in 1991 by her adoptive parents two days after they adopted another girl. She said her Canadian parents never gave her a reason for sending her back to Romania. In a Canadian TV documentary, her adoptive father said Alexandra was unhappy in Canada and had asked to go home.

At a news conference here Thursday, Austin called on authorities to investigate thousands of foreign adoptions carried out after the country's communist government was overthrown in 1989.

She was from a large family and had been put up for adoption after the death of one of her seven siblings, she said. She urged authorities to set up a registry that would allow adopted children to locate their birth families.

"I have a sister (adopted) in Italy and I don't know anything about her," she said.

Romania imposed strict limits on foreign adoptions in 2001 following allegations of corruption in the adoption system. Beginning in 2005, only biological grandparents can adopt children outside the country.

The halting of adoptions has prompted protests from charities, foreign governments and thousands of couples who were caught in the middle of the adoption process.

Austin says earlier foreign adoptions should be investigated.

She said her adoption had resulted in problems for her in Romania.

Her five-month stay in Canada was not enough to qualify her for citizenship, but she didn't have a Romanian identity card and so was denied access to schools and social services in that country, she said, adding that she did not receive any help to recover her Romanian citizenship and documents.

Now a mother herself, Austin said Romanian authorities initially refused to issue identity papers for her four-year-old daughter. After a long struggle with bureaucracy, Austin obtained Romanian identity papers for herself and her daughter in 2002 with the help of the Save the Children charity and is now enrolled in a school program.

Austin's story was told in a documentary that aired across Canada earlier this year.

Austin, who is unemployed, has also filed a lawsuit in Canada seeking at least $7 million Cdn.

Named in the suit were Joseph Austin, formerly of Ancaster, Ont., but now a prominent heart surgeon in Bellevue, Wash., his ex-wife, who now lives in Italy, and the Canadian and Ontario governments. None of the allegations have been proven in court.

It didn't take long to discover how wrong she was.

Within weeks of arriving in early 2004, the 3-year-old started crying uncontrollably, striking his older sister, breaking furniture and deliberately urinating around the house.

Months into his adoption, the boy seemed unwilling or unable to learn even a small amount of English.

"We knew it would be challenging, and certainly we knew he might have some physical problems because he was so underweight, but we were totally unprepared for something like this," says Alexander, a former third-grade teacher in the Los Angeles area. "I found myself doing things I never thought I'd do, like spanking him. I cannot describe how depressing and frustrating the experience was."

What happened should not have been a complete surprise. The child's behavior problems are startlingly common, to varying degrees, among children adopted from Eastern Europe. A succession of doctor appointments, therapies and Internet searches for information linked the child's troubles to his history of being institutionalized and possible alcohol use by his biological mother, Alexander says. She says her son is doing much better now. He's picking up English but continues to have outbursts.

Dark side of story

A recent spate of highly publicized cases of U.S. parents charged with or convicted of killing their children adopted out of Russia cast a disturbing light on what has long been a problem downplayed by the adoption industry: Many children brought to the USA from abroad have physical and emotional problems that can't be forecast from photos or brief visits in orphanages.

Russia has long been a top nation for Americans who adopt abroad. Last year, American parents brought home 5,865 Russian children, about 25% of all children adopted abroad.

In all, 14 Russian children have died in these cases. That number has spurred outraged Russian politicians to push for reforms and even a moratorium on foreign adoptions.

In each of the criminal cases, the parents' lawyers have argued that the defendants lost control as they tried to cope with unruly children who are beset by hard-to-fathom troubles. No one is arguing that the deaths are excusable, but Victor Groza, a social work professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, says the cases do point to questions of whether adoption agencies are so eager to close the deals that they fail to warn parents of the potential problems.

Some need lifelong help

"We say there are three groups of children: about 20% whom we call the 'resilient rascals' because they come over and thrive right away, about 60% who we call 'wounded warriors' because they have serious problems but they get better after the first year or so, and another 20% who are challenged children who may require lifelong help," he says.

Groza founded an experimental program paid for by the U.S. Department of Education in which master's degree students visit newly adoptive families weekly to help with post-adoption problems.

Groza notes that his statistics, which are based on anecdotal experience, can be seen by optimists as indicating that 80% of the kids turn out OK. They also can be seen by pessimists as saying the same amount have problems. Yet, he says, either way parents need better information and more help.

"These are all special-needs kids in some sense," says Gay Ketterer of Eagle Lake, Wis., who adopted a 4-year-old daughter from Russia in 1994 and found the impulsive, disobedient child difficult to control. "It took years for me to understand and realize what's going on with my daughter. It's lonely because you can't talk to your mother or your neighbor about it, because they don't understand."

Many of the problems arise because the children have spent long periods of time in miserly orphanages without much attention, education or proper nourishment, says Thais Tepper, co-founder of the Parents Network for the Post-Institutionalized Child. Tepper, who had similar challenges with her own adopted child from Romania a decade ago, says such experience often leads to "reactive attachment disorder," the child's inability to bond with the new parents. Tepper adds that Eastern European children frequently have developmental delays consistent with fetal alcohol syndrome.

"Agencies do a lot to sell that the kids are perfectly normal," Tepper says. "They just tell these parents to just give it a little time. Then, months go by and then they are told: 'Just give them a little love and food. That'll take care of it.' "

For their part, many agencies say they have learned to offer more help and warning, but parents often are so blinded by their desire for a child that they don't listen.

"The problem sometimes can be that families believe what they want to believe and think that a lot of love and just bringing this child home will work a miracle," says Ron Stoddard, executive director of Nightlight Christian Adoptions in Fullerton, Calif. "We now tell our families that unless there is definitive information to the contrary, you have to assume the parents (in Russia) abused alcohol."

New standards stalled

Few U.S. laws govern international adoptions other than those relating to immigration. And there are no federal standards to require any form of services after adoption. Congress passed a law in 2000 to ratify an international agreement known as The Hague Treaty, which would mandate standards for adoption agencies. The standards would require more rigorous disclosures of the children's conditions and more careful monitoring of families before and after the adoption. But the treaty requires specific rules to be drawn up by the State Department, a process that has stalled since 2003 when a proposed draft copy was issued for public comment.

The delay frustrates Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., co-chair of the Congressional Council on Adoption. She worries that a Russian moratorium would leave in limbo the fate of an estimated 700,000 orphans in Russia. Landrieu had written to Russian politicians more than a year ago, promising the Hague rules would be in effect "by fall" — meaning autumn of last year.

"Many members of Congress are very displeased with this very slow pace," Landrieu says. "The new rules are purposely drafted to close loopholes that currently exist."

State Department spokeswoman Angela Aggeler said in an e-mail that it is unclear when the rules would be made final. The process has taken a long time because the department was overwhelmed with public comments on the draft issued in 2003, she said.

Beyond this, the only accreditation process for adoption agencies is voluntary and pursued by a small minority of agencies. Russia now allows adoptions only through agencies the Russian government accredits. But unaccredited agencies can ally themselves with accredited ones and continue to process adoptions. And the Joint Council on International Adoption, a national organization of adoption agencies, has operational standards that its members must adhere to, but it has never thrown out an agency for violations.

Prosecutors found serious violations in the prolongation of accreditation to most of the organizations authorized to assist in child adoption in Russia.

"It has been stated that 31 out of 52 offices of foreign organizations received accreditation in violation of current legislation," said the report, signed by Deputy Prosecutor General Mikhail Fridinsky.

Earlier this month Fridinsky said at a meeting with Thomas Atwood, president of the U.S. National Council for Adoption, that the Prosecutor General's Office intends to strip foreign adoption agencies of their accreditation in Russia if they break the law.

In 2004 the number of children adopted by foreign nationals surpassed the number of those adopted by Russians. Foreigners adopted 9,600 Russian orphans, while Russian nationals adopted only 7,400.

At the same time society has been shocked by the notorious trials of adoptive parents from the United States.

The court hearings in the case of Peggy Sue Hilt, charged with killing her 2-year-old adoptive Russian daughter, recently began in the U.S.

Another woman, Irma Pavlis was sentenced to 12 years in prison in May for killing her 6-year-old disabled adoptive son. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in April but was acquitted of the more serious charge of first-degree murder.

Altogether, 13 Russian children have been killed in the U.S.

In Aug. 2005 the Pennsylvania State Court found adoptive father Matthew Alan Mancuso guilty of incest and the rape of his 12-year-old daughter adopted from Russia.

Several days earlier an American couple was charged with manslaughter, first-degree child abuse resulting in death and reckless endangerment after their adoptive son from Russia died of starvation.

In an unusual proceeding, Matthew Mancuso, 47, was found guilty in what Deputy District Attorney Laura Ditka said was a stipulated nonjury trial before Common Pleas Judge Donna Jo McDaniel.

This means that Mancuso presented no defense and did not contest the charges after Ditka presented her case and witnesses.

McDaniel found him guilty of rape of a child, aggravated indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, unlawful restraint, incest, corruption of a minor, child endangerment, and two counts each of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child and indecent assault of a child under age 13.

Ditka withdrew charges of sexual abuse of a child by photography and selling obscene items.

Mancuso will be sentenced Nov. 14. His defense attorney, Stanley Greenfield, said Mancuso faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 additional years after his federal term has been served.

"[Yesterday's proceeding] is sometimes called a 'slow guilty plea," Greenfield said yesterday.

By not pleading guilty to the state charges, Mancuso has preserved his right to appeal the prosecution, Greenfield said.

McDaniel denied Greenfield's motion to dismiss the charges on grounds that he had not been brought to trial within 365 days.

He argued that since county officials first arrested and formally arraigned Mancuso in May 2003, then withdrew the charges a month later in deference to the federal case, that the 365 days had expired.

After Mancuso's federal conviction last year, and after he already had begun serving his time, photos of him involved in sex acts with the girl, now 12 and living with a foster parent, began reappearing on the Internet.

Investigators in Canada seized about 200 of the photos after they appeared on the Internet there.

Federal authorities in Florida, where some of the photos were taken, and in Pennsylvania, traced the origin to Mancuso, leading to the state charges being filed.

Florida officials also are considering criminal charges against Mancuso.

In 1998, when the girl was 5, Mancuso adopted her from a Russian orphanage through an agency in New Jersey. Investigators believe the abuse started with her first night with Mancuso when he had her sleeping nude with him in his bed.

Federal agents from the Crimes Against Children Task Force, during a routine investigation of child pornography, raided Mancuso's house in May 2003. They found the girl still was living there at that time.

A jury convicted Irma Pavlis of Schaumburg last month of involuntary manslaughter but acquitted her of the more serious charge of first-degree murder in the death of her son, Alex.

Prosecutors say Pavlis admitted repeatedly striking the boy in December of 2003. But defense attorneys contend the brain injuries that killed him were the result of fetal alcohol syndrome from his natural mother's excessive drinking during pregnancy.

The case has prompted outrage in Russia, where a top prosecutor is urging his country to sign international treaties on adoption in hopes of improving the supervision of children placed abroad.

Prosecutors believe she beat the orphan to death, and the judges are expected to reach a verdict within a week.

The lifeless body of Alex was found at the Pavlises' house in the town of Schaumburg, Illinois, in December 2003, five weeks after he and his sister Julia had arrived to the U.S from the Siberian town of Eisk.

During the first court session three doctors, a dispatcher, police sergeant, paramedic and adoption specialist testified against Irma Pavlis. The orphan's death was caused by a combination of bruising and swelling of his brain, doctors said.

However, Shannon Lynch, Pavlis' attorney, claims Alex suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition that caused erratic behavior, including self-mutilation. The boy used to scratch his face, dig into his skin, bang his head against walls, wear diapers at the age of six and throw himself into "violent fits of rage".

He admitted that Pavlis "crossed the line" only twice, once punching Alex and the other time squeezing his penis in an attempt to stop him from urinating after he spread feces on a wall. But she did not kill her son, the defense lawyer stressed.

A child abuse specialist who examined Alex's body said it was covered with bruises in areas where a child was unlikely to hurt himself.

Instead of spending from $40,000 to $50,000 to adopt foreign children through an American agency, Dino and Irma Pavlis, whose annual income is approximately $35,000, spent about $11,000 to adopt Alex and Julia through a Russian-based child broker.

In addition, Marilyn Hite-Ross, a Cook County assistant state's attorney, said, they deliberately hid the children's adoption from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

Though the couple passed background checks with an independent agency designed to screen American families hoping to adopt foreign children, they didn't contact the agency as instructed when they returned from Russia.

Dino Pavlis, however, has not been charged in the case.

But in Russia, logically enough — after all, a six-year-old boy was killed nowhere else, but in the U.S. — the case received at least 50 publications a day. Most of them referred the reader to Chicago Tribune articles and to AP materials. News editors cynically call the Pavlis news "the anti-American sensation" and spent little time working on them: anti-Americanism sells well both in Russia and out of it.

But what's tragic is that behind the "Americans killing our children" speculations few people can see the real problems.

The Pavlis case has been described in sufficient detail. I can only add that involuntary manslaughter both in Russia and the U.S. is a serious crime, often confused with killing by carelessness which is indeed punished mildly. Judging by the immensely high bail — $3 million — that the court required for Irma Pavlis's release, the accused cannot expect any leniency. Such cases are quite common in the U.S. where the law is severe — similar cases can be found in the newswire of NAIC (www.adoption.com).

The question is whether Russia should draw any conclusions from what happened, and if it should — what they would be.

There is a slight difference in the statistics of nonviolent deaths of Russian U.S.-adopted children. The Chicago paper offers information about 12 children starting from 1990, when the USSR opened the way out of Russia to adoptive children by ratifying the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. However, Ministry of Education representatives stated another number in an interview to the Russian television company NTV: eight cases in 15 years. The total number of Russian children adopted by U.S. nationals is recorded in the state department's papers: 5,865 children in 2004; since 1990 the overall number of children exceeds 60,000. So in fact there is one tragedy happening every 1.5-2 years. At the moment Russia has around 125,000-130,000 parentless children. This is approximately the number of adoptions taking place in the United States annually, with only 15 percent of adopted children coming from abroad, and consequently 20-25 percent of them coming from Russia.

Russian and Romanian children are the biggest part of the problem.

The thing is that children from China, South Korea, Guatemala, Ukraine (these are all world leaders in "nobody's children" export, and Russia holds second place, right after China) mostly go to families of the same culture and speaking the same language. Children from Russia, however, usually have to learn English — because in Russia Irma Pavlis needed an interpreter to talk to her adopted children, little Alexei could hardly understand what his foster mother was telling him. There are also few adoptions from Russia relatives to the United States: children mostly go there from orphanages, not from distant relatives.

Since 1996, when the rules of international adoption in Russia became more or less clear, the number of U.S.-adopted children has been growing 8-11 percent a year. And exactly why the number is increasing so rapidly, although the demographic situation in Russia and the statistics on income stratification offer nothing to account for this increase, should be investigated.

I have a feeling that not only U.S. foster parents, but also Russian adoption officials bear responsibility for the hard lives many Russian children lead outside Russia.

Back in February, about 7,000 potential and actual U.S. parents signed a petition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking him to intervene in the current adoption practice. I don't know whether my idea is worth any serious attention, but the anti-American neurosis in the Russian media can be seen as a kind of response to this petition.

The Pavlis case that started in December 2003 is playing into the hands of small dealers of Russia's not so much most monstrous, but rather most unpleasant market — the child trade market.

This market's turnover is easy to imagine. The adoption industry in the United States is a market of $3.5-4 billion annually. In the United States an adoption costs $4,000-30,000 plus unlimited sums spent on the so-called "adoption agency": the costs can reach $15,000-150,000. As for international adoption, the NAIC states the average amounts that foster parents have to spend. In the United States official costs make up about $1,000. The rest — $7,000-25,000 — you can pay to a licensed adoption agent. Another option that U.S. adoption web-sites call "additional expenses on individual child search" is to pay the money straight to someone in Guatemala or Russia who helps you find a child.

Theoretically, to find a child for adoption in Russia is free of charge: the state doesn't sell parentless children; you only have to pay the necessary charges defined by the law. In reality, however, it is often different. In 2003 the Pavlis family found the licensed U.S. adoption agents in Russia too expensive and turned to some private person for assistance. The deal proved cheap: two children — the Pavlis also adopted a five-year-old girl, now probably sent to another family — cost them $11,000. This was clear dumping; usually to adopt a single Russian child costs $10,000-15,000.

This money is mostly spent on bribes that foreigners have to pay everywhere — from the orphanage to the court where the act of adoption is registered.

Foster parents from Russia have to spend from several months to two years on the waiting list. Meanwhile, a licensed AAi Texas adoption agency offers Texans the opportunity to complete the procedures in a month. If they find a child in the agency's database (such databases are absolutely illegal), the first trip to Russia will take five days, then there will be three weeks of waiting, then eight more days in Russia. After that, AAi claims, you can return to Texas with a new family member. The agency also gives a list of cities where the quick procedure is possible: Astrakhan, Stavropol, Vladivostok.

It would be strange if the three stated regions preferred U.S. foster parents to Russian ones for no reason at all. Most probably, here the scale of child export and the stripping of U.S. nationals of their money is especially great. We can assume the same counts for the regions where the number of foreign adoptions is equal to or exceeds the average Russian figures, for example, the Sverdlovsk region.

It's easy to picture an average dealer in this illegal industry: loving children and wishing them well, having access to local court and educational bodies, or most likely working there; having orphanage directors as friends; perfectly sure what he is doing is a good deed. What's more, he — although more often it's a she, a business-like middle-aged woman with a pedagogical degree and work experience — is a criminal and knows that what she is doing is actually human trafficking. And if somebody asks the dealer to assist some quiet Americans from Chicago, the dealer is not going to be too scrupulous about papers and certificates. These Americans couldn't possibly buy children to beat them, not for such huge sums. And you can't get so much money from Russians.

6,000 adopted Russian children in the United States and another 3,000-4,000 worldwide is a market with a minimum turnover of $100 million a year. Much of this money goes to Russian children traders.

It's the fault of the abovementioned middle-aged ladies that Russian nationals have to wait for ages before they can adopt an orphaned child, although the priority of Russian foster parents is stated not only in the Hague Convention, but in a dozen other documents. And these ladies are to blame also that stories similar to little Alexei Pavlis's will be repeated, unless the current "market" situation changes.

Let's be frank. Child export, a result of Russia's poverty, can be stopped, but there is no necessity to stop it. It will decline as soon as Russian foster parents' priority rights cease to be sold for hard currency. Anti-American invectives are beneficial for the child trade market dealers — they are bound to use them as a pretext to raise the bribe tariffs. Leaving the Hague Convention is easy, but useless. Ukraine never ratified it, but child export from Ukraine is growing as rapidly as in Russia.

Until everyone involved in the business stops sharing there love for children with U.S. foster parents at a reasonable price, Russians will have to queue for adoption, and the illegal child trade will result in more rare, but real tragedies. Handle them, and leave Irma Pavlis alone. The U.S. court doesn't appreciate child murderers, but Russia appreciates bribes.

Dino Pavlis, however, has not been charged in the case.

"Quite often adopting a child costs up to $50,000," Kolesnikov told the Duma deputies during the hearings held in the lower house on Monday. "Thus, adoption has turned into a profitable business. It is disgusting, indeed."

Recently, the Prosecutor General's Office has been receiving an ever-increasing number of complaints against foreigners, seeking to adopt Russian children.

However, only a handful of such complaints resulted in instigation of criminal proceedings over the past years, the official admitted. In the period of 1998 to 2004 only 17 such cases were investigated and only 3 persons were held criminally liable for unlawful adoption. "Over the past 12 months not a single such case was launched altogether," the deputy prosecutor general fumed.

He also called for conclusion of bilateral treaties between Russia and foreign states on legal aid on family and children's affairs. "The problem is that reports on adopted Russian children living abroad, on their life, are not always submitted on time, if ever," Kolesnikov said.

The prosecutor also noted that in 2003 more children were adopted by foreign nationals than by Russians. In some cases foreigners received information on children who need adoption faster, he noted.

Russian Interior Ministry, too, voiced serious concern over what they referred to as negative tendencies in adoption of children who lost their parents.

Statistics show that the share of international adoptions has been growing lately, deputy head of the Interior Ministry's Public Security Service General Nikolai Pershutkin told a round table session at the State Duma.

According to Pershutkin, over the past decade over 45,000 Russian children were adopted by foreign nationals and taken out of the country. Over the period of 2001 to 2003 the rate of adoption of Russian children by foreigners grew by 51 per cent, he said.

Gaps in legislation governing adoption make it impossible to control the process and protect the interests of adopted children, the official said.

Law enforcers voice serious alarm over the so-called independent adoption, where Russian children are taken out of the country by the so-called "independent adopters". In 2003 alone as many as 2,500 children were taken out of the country by those people, and their fate remains unknown.

Such services are often offered to foreigners by Russians who have obtained foreign citizenship. "In fact, a criminal business has been formed in this sphere," Pershutkin said. The official called for introducing "tough legislative requirements, concrete instruments for law enforcement authorities to be able to control those activities and to prevent unlawful adoption."

General Prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov made the proposal on the day a Chicago court was due to sentence a U.S. woman for the manslaughter of her adopted Russian son, a case that has attracted blanket media coverage in Russia.

But activists said extra red tape would discourage potential foreign adopters, who each year take about 7,000 children — including many with disabilities and behavioural disorders — out of often underfunded orphanages.

Foreigners account for half of Russia's 15,000 annual adoptions, but Ustinov said the children needed to be protected.

"In connection with the increasingly frequent cases of abuse of Russian children by foreigners, Vladimir Ustinov sent a suggestion to the government about reaching agreement with states where citizens adopt Russian children about checking on their condition," Ustinov's office said in a statement.

Would-be parents say adopting Russian children already involves battling with bureaucracy, and that any new regulations would just make it harder to give orphans a loving home.

A group of U.S. citizens published an open letter to President Vladimir Putin in the Russian press in February asking him to loosen restrictions and enable them to rescue more children from Russia's orphanages.

More than 150,000 children — many of them living in poverty — are on government lists as eligible for adoption. Last year's 15,000 registered adoptions barely dented the total.

MANSLAUGHTER

But the image of foreign adoption has been severely tarnished by the case of Irma Pavlis, who was convicted of manslaughter following the death of her six-year-old Russian adoptive son. She was due to be sentenced later on Wednesday.

"Official figures for the last few years alone show 13 adopted children from Russia were killed by foreigners — 12 of them in the United States," the prosecutor's statement said.

Russian news agencies quoted sources as suggesting Ustinov's proposal was likely to find favour with ministers.

"The document was submitted yesterday evening. It is constructive and pragmatic," RIA Novosti quoted a government source as saying.

"Ustinov's suggestion undoubtedly came as a reaction to the latest killing of a Russian child in the United States."

But children's rights activists said international agreements were unlikely to help solve the problem, and that restrictions on adoptions would be misguided.

"(For nationalists) this is a question of prestige. They do not want us to be up there with Africa in the ranks of countries that cannot look after their children," said Galina Krasnitskaya of the Centre for Childhood, a support group.

"But to ban foreign adoption would be wrong because Russian parents cannot take the children, and it is better for children to live in a family abroad than in some children's home."

Foreign adoption is a growing trend in the adoption community, and it's particularly popular among singles who want children.

The Early Show's Debbye Turner sat down with one woman, in Pacifica, Calif., who reached into her heart and then reached overseas to find a son and fulfill her life long dream of motherhood.

Everyday for the last year, Allison West has stopped at a PS store in Pacifica, Calif. to take care of some mail, but today, she arrived with a package that she's not letting go of.

Baby Tyler is a new delivery, of sorts.

Allison West says, “I feel complete and overwhelmed right now with joy.”

The joy of motherhood is something she has searched for, for years. After one miscarriage, and two failed marriages, she found herself single at 45, and wanting a baby.

So as a single woman, she decided to adopt. “That was my option,” she says, ‘it was the only one left. And I wasn't going to let being single get in the way of having my family.”

But at first, being single did get in the way of having a family. Not all adoption agencies are single parent friendly.

She says, “I was completely shocked. I thought, they would rather have a kid go to, maybe a bad marriage or a couple who is faking it as they go along and here I am, ready and willing, and able to love a child.”

After some research, she found that it would easier, as a single person, to adopt from a foreign country. And there were other benefits to international adoption.

West says, “I had heard so many horror stories of people who had done domestic adoptions. They had like literally up to the door to pick up their baby and then the birthmother changed their mind. And I thought, you know, at 45, I couldn't take that chance. I wanted the sure thing, and once you start looking at international adoption, people start telling you it's not ‘if,’ it's ‘when.’”

West identified a U.S. based agency that handled adoptions in the Eastern European country of Belarus.

She says, “They accepted singles. They have a high caregiver-baby ratio. And the orphanage where my son was from, they had roughly four caregivers for about ten kids. Plus pediatricians run the orphanage. So all those factors, I took into account and decided to go with Belarus.”

West first saw pictures of her future son over the Internet. He was 9 months old and his name was "Ivars." After a year long process, she traveled to his homeland to unite them as mother and son.

Showing a photo of the moment she and Tyler were first introduced, West says it was an incredibly special day. “All of a sudden the nurse walks in holding this baby and I look up and that's my baby and I just couldn't believe it,” she recalls.

“We just left the orphanage and we said goodbye to everyone,” she adds, “I have my sleepy boy here. He is very tired. I'm hoping he'll fall asleep in my arms.”

After a few long days of doctors’ appointments, hotel stays, and more paperwork, mother and son flew back to U.S. soil, where friends and family welcomed them.

A home video shows West saying to the camera, “What do I have to say? I am in love with my boy and I think he loves me, just look at how he holds my hand. I'm so happy to be home. (Choked up, she mouths: I'm thrilled.)

It's been a couple months now, and Tyler has become a true American. He loves Cheerios and he's already had his first trip to Supercuts. It's been a celebration of firsts.

West says, “It was a real milestone to say, I was with him on his first birthday.”

She has made Tyler's Russian name, Ivars, his middle name, and she intends to teach him all she can about where he came from.

Showing a Russian rattle to her son, West says, “This is a marushka, which is made in Russia. And it's their traditional kind of decorative piece.”

The biggest challenge for this single mom will be balancing her career, as a self employed lawyer, with the demands of motherhood and trusting her instincts.

She explains, “Oh, my gosh. He's screaming, like, do I need to call someone? I don't have a partner to run it by. Like, is this normal? So, I call my mother a lot.”

And if she has any more questions, she can ask the adoption agency. They will be conducting "home studies" for another three years on she and Tyler.

West says, “It's Belarussian policy. They want to make sure everything is ok. They are very strict about that.”

But this team of two won't have trouble convincing anyone that they're meant to be.

West only regret is that she didn’t do it sooner. She says, “They say in the adoption community, you get the child you were meant to have. He is every second of every day, my child. I have no doubt about that."

The following is information from the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse (NAIC):

Most singles are adopting through international adoption

• According to the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 33 percent of children adoption from Foster Care is by a single parent (U.S. DHHS, 2000). [These figures are only fro special needs adoption]
• Research in the 1970s found that an estimated .5 percent to 4 percent of persons completing adoptions were single. Studies in the 1980s found from 8 percent to 34 percent of adopters were single. (Stolley, 1993)
• Across the country the number of single parent placements slowly and steadily continues to increase, both in domestic and intercountry adoption. (Feigelman and Silverman, 1993)

• Most single adoptive parents are female, are most likely to adopt older children than infants, and are less likely to have been a foster parent to the adopted child (Stolley, 1993)
• Single parent applicants are self-selective. Most applicants have high levels of emotional maturity and high capacity for frustration, and are independent but linked to a supportive network of relatives. (Branham, 1970)
• As a group, the single parent adopters of U.S. children tended to adopt "special needs" children who were older, minority, and/or handicapped children. (Feigelman and Silverman, 1997)

• In a study undertaken by the Los Angeles Department of Adoptions, researchers found that single parents tended to have more difficulties in completing their adoptions. Thirty-nine percent had made three or more previous attempts to adopt, compared to only 18 percent among the couples. (Feigelman and Silverman, 1997)
• In 1983, Feigelman and Silverman recontacted 60 percent of the single-parent respondents from their earlier study in 1977. Six years after the initial study, the adjustment of children raised by single parents remained similar to that of children raised by adoptive couples. (Groze and Rosenthal, 1991)
• Groze and Rosenthal conducted a study that reports on the responses from parents in three midwestern states who had finalized their adoption of a special-needs child before 1988. The sample included 122 single-parents and 651 two-parent families. Researchers found that comparisons of single-parent homes to two-parent homes showed that children in single-parent families experienced fewer problems. (Groze and Rosenthal, 1991)
• In the same study, research found that single-parent families were more likely than two-parent families to evaluate the adoption's impact as being very positive. (Groze and Rosenthal, 1991)

"No?" Chea Kim says, when told the desperate woman has changed her mind about giving up her children for as little as $20 each. "Why not?"

Although illegal baby sales may have slowed since the United States, France, the Netherlands and several other countries started suspending international adoptions from Cambodia two years ago, the practice persists in poverty-stricken villages like Laing Kout, according to an investigation by the Associated Press.

In Chea Kim's case, an orphanage catering to international adoptions approached her five years ago and told her it was willing to pay up to $100 for newborns, so she gave them her own 3-day-old daughter.

Later, she regretted the decision. But that didn't stop her from persuading other mothers to sell their babies — 18 in total — claiming they had been abandoned and the birth parents were unknown. This is done to circumvent Cambodian law, which limits adoptions to abandonment or the death of a child's parents.

Others in the poor village, most of whom earn less than $1 a day as contract laborers in rice and bean fields, recognized a good business opportunity and also started bringing babies to the WOVA Cham Chao orphanage just outside Phnom Penh, the capital.

Many of the women who gave up their newborns in Laing Kout were too poor to raise them — receiving as little as $20 for each child from intermediaries like Chea Kim. Some did so after being left by their husbands, out of spite or desperation, or in hope that adoptive parents or the children would send back money in years to come.

Complaints about baby sales and thefts have come to a near standstill since the United States and France — the two largest markets for Cambodian children — put a hold on adoptions, said Women's Affairs Minister Mu Sochua. But some villagers are still trying to cash in.

WOVA Cham Chao stopped accepting babies a few years ago, but another orphanage opened in nearby Kandal province's Kein Svay district, villagers said.

Nop Phat, a farmer, who has delivered five babies to the orphanage, rattles off the names of pregnant women in and around Laing Kout. He knows who is willing to sell a baby and who is not. He had high hopes for Soum Savy, who had twins two months ago, but she changed her mind.

"At first I was going to give them away, because I was sick and had no milk," said Soum Savy, 40, emerging from a wooden house on stilts with the babies, one weighing just 4 pounds, his skeletal legs badly deformed.

"Now that I'm feeling better, I want to keep them," said Soum Savy, who has seven other children and no idea what she and her husband will do to feed them.

Stories about selling children are not uncommon in Cambodia — whether for adoption, prostitution, or domestic service.

Decades of war — bombing by the United States in the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1975-79 and military occupation by Vietnam in the 1980s — have destroyed the social fabric, said Dr. Sotheara Chhim, deputy director of the Transcultural Psycho-social Organization.

Little has been done in the years that followed to rebuild institutions that traditionally foster a sense of community or build values and trust.

The most severe damage was done during the Khmer Rouge's bloody four-year reign. Maoist-inspired revolutionaries purposefully obliterated all aspects of traditional Cambodia, emptying the cities and herding people to the countryside to work as slaves in the rice fields.

As many as 2 million Cambodians, or 1 in 5, died of starvation, overwork, execution or illness.

People were taught to think only of the revolution, with the result that they learned to think only of themselves in order to survive, said Sotheara Chhim.

Even Cambodia's king has expressed concern.

"Extreme poverty among a large number of our people...has pushed a non-negligible number of parents to sell their children to rich foreigners," King Norodom Sihanouk, 81, wrote on his Web site in February.

Margaret Hodge, the Children's Minister, was accused of acting outside her powers when she suspended all such adoptions indefinitely in June last year.

The Government, along with other Western countries, took action because of growing corruption and child trafficking in Cambodia.

There was particular concern that sufficient safeguards were not in place to prevent children being adopted without proper consent from their birth parents.

Helen Mountfield, appearing for the six couples, said it was accepted there were problems and she was not arguing for the right for British couples to be allowed to "adopt a child at any price".

But the Government had tackled the issue the wrong way and could have introduced appropriate measures short of a ban so that Cambodian children adopted in the UK were not separated from their birth parents without true consent, or as a result of corruption.

Ms Mountfield said the Government had also acted unfairly and unlawfully in the cases of couples who had begun adoption procedures only to see them halted by the ban.

One of the couples, referred to as X and Y for legal reasons, had already adopted one Cambodian child and wished to adopt a second.

Ms Mountfield said the ban had meant that their two-year-old child was being denied a sibling from her own ethnic and cultural background in breach of her Article 8 rights to a private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights.

She told Mr Justice Munby, sitting at the High Court in London, at the start of a two-day hearing, the case took place in the context of "a major humanitarian crisis in Cambodia" involving orphaned children, particularly as a result of the Aids epidemic.

Wicklow-based lawyer Gus Cullen said he was preparing an application for the High Court which would cancel the adoption in Ireland after receiving instructions from Joe and Lala Dowse.

However, the solicitor said he was waiting for a report from the Adoption Board and the Department of Foreign Affairs before progressing matters.

"I'm hopeful there will be a breakthrough in the next week or two," he said, adding that the Dowses would "facilitate any procedures that are in Tristan's best interest".

Tristan was adopted by Joe Dowse and his wife Lala when he was two-months-old. He was placed in the care of an orphanage in Jakarta two years later after the couple said the adoption did not work out.

Last week he was moved from the Jakarta orphanage to a State-run facility by Indonesian authorities.There is confusion over the status of the adoption.

The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly is sending a rapporteur to Kharkiv as Ukraine's prosecutors delve into the cases of three mothers.

"People are afraid to even give birth now," Kharkiv campaigner Tatyana Zakharova told the BBC News website.

The main hospital under scrutiny has dismissed accusations against it.

Ruth-Gaby Vermot-Mangold, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (Pace) rapporteur, is to visit Maternity Hospital No 6 after her arrival on Monday and will meet local parents, Ms Zakharova and Ukrainian officials.

Her trip will also take her to the capital, Kiev, amid reports that babies may have been snatched at birth in other Ukrainian cities.

The alleged baby thefts go back to the autumn of 2002 but the case achieved wider publicity last year after MPs from across Europe tabled a motion at the Pace, which brings together 46 countries.

Underlining real concern over baby-trafficking from Eastern Europe, they pointed to newspaper adverts in Moldova encouraging single mothers there to sell a child for 3,000 euros.

Communal grave

"There has been no concrete follow-up in these three [Kharkiv] cases," Agnes Nollinger, who is accompanying Ms Vermot-Mangold, told the BBC News website on Friday.

Prosecutors are still investigating the three cases, nearly three years after Svetlana Puzikova arrived in labour at Hospital No 6 in the early hours of a November morning.

She was in her 40th week and her family were waiting to visit the new mother and child later in the day.

Only the midwife and one other woman who was not introduced to her were at hand for the birth, Tatyana Zakharova of the National Ukrainian Federation of Multiple-child Families (NUFMF) told the BBC.

The last she saw of her baby was it being passed to the stranger. After that, 20 kilos lighter after her delivery, she and her family were told it had died at birth.

According to the NUFMF, doctors' records indicated the birth of a healthy child was to be expected.

No birth or death certificates were issued as an "abortion" had occurred, and the family was told that the remains of Svetlana's baby had been consigned to a communal grave with 27 other foetuses as "bio waste".

When the family demanded an inquest, this grave was reopened the following year in the thaw of the harsh Ukrainian winter.

Inside, the NUFMF reports, were 30 sets of remains, not 28, and Svetlana's baby could not be identified among them.

First-time mums

In late December 2002, Lena Zakharova (no relation to Tatyana) should have given birth to her first baby at Hospital No 6.

It, too, was declared dead, as was the baby of a third mother, who gave birth at a different hospital in Kharkiv, a city of 1.5m people in eastern Ukraine.

All three women, according to Tatyana Zakharova, were first-time mums and each was in excellent health.

This factor leads her to suspect the babies may have been stolen for illegal adoption or, even worse, for the use of their organs.

Reports say the remains in the grave had had their organs and brains removed.

"They were like gutted rabbits," Tatyana Zakharova told the BBC.

Larissa Nazarenko, head of Hospital No 6, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency that "not a single fact" had been proven.

The Council of Europe team will be in Ukraine until Thursday to compile a report that will then be handed to the Parliamentary Assembly.

Their adoptive parents, Michael Gravelle, 56, and Sharen Gravelle, 57, denied in a custody hearing Monday that they abused or neglected the children, who are ages 1-14 and have conditions that included autism and fetal alcohol syndrome.

No charges had been filed as of Tuesday afternoon, and messages left with the couple's lawyer were not immediately returned.

The Gravelles have said a psychiatrist recommended they make the children sleep in the cages, Huron County Prosecutor Russell Leffler told the Norwalk Reflector. The parents said the children, including some who had mental disorders, needed to be protected from each other, according to a search warrant on file at Norwalk Municipal Court.

Leffler refused to speak with an Associated Press reporter Tuesday at his office.

Neighbors said they often saw or heard the children playing, and the family yard was littered with toys — plastic cars, tricycles, slides and an overturned skateboard near a wooden ramp. Seven bicycles were piled in a storage shed.

"Those kids were dressed better than some of the kids who live in Cleveland. They behaved like any other kids when they were outside playing," said Jim Power, who lives across the street.

At night, authorities say, eight of the children were confined in 3 1/2-foot-tall wooden cages stacked in bedrooms on the second floor. The cages were painted in bright, primary colors, with some rigged with alarms that would send a signal to the downstairs when a cage door was opened. One cage had a dresser in front of it, county sheriff's Lt. Randy Sommers said Tuesday.

"The sheriff and I stood there for a few minutes and just kind of stared at what we were seeing. We were speechless," Sommers said.

No one answered the Gravelles' door Tuesday, and the gray, four-bedroom house was dark. A pig, roosters and other animals shared the yard outside Wakeman, a city of about 1,000 people 50 miles west of Cleveland.

The children have been placed with four foster families and were doing well, said Erich Dumbeck, director of the Huron County Department of Job and Family Services.

"We're still trying to figure out what happened in that home. We don't have any indication at this point that there was any abuse," Dumbeck said.

Sommers said a social worker investigating a complaint contacted authorities. Dumbeck would not discuss the complaint.

According to the search warrant, the cages had mats and the house smelled of urine. One boy said he slept in a cage for three years, Sommers said. A baby slept in a small bed, and two girls used mattresses

Deputies said they were called to the home last year when a 12-year-old boy was upset and ran away for several hours. He was found not far away.

Although the family has lived in Huron County for 10 years, the children were adopted through other counties and states, Dumbeck said. He said his agency was trying to determine how the adoptions were completed.

"I don't believe there were any caseworkers checking in with this family," he said. Reviews are ordered only when there is a complaint.

One of the children, a boy born with HIV, was adopted as an infant in 2001 through the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services, the agency's director Jim McCafferty said. For caring for him, the Gravelles received a subsidy of at least $500 a month.

The private agencies who reviewed the couple's home life before the adoption gave them "glowing reports," McCafferty said.

Leah Hunter, who lives two houses away, said she often saw the children walking down the road.

"They looked OK. They hardly ever wore shoes but I'm a country girl and for me that's normal," she said.

British newspaper The Sun, however, tracked down 18-year-old Mentaweb Dawit, who claims she is Zahara's birth mother.

But Dawit won't challenge the Tomb Raider star over the adoption, she told The Sun.

"I want to say thank you to Angelina for giving my baby this wonderful, loving family."

Under Ethiopian law, however, Jolie must reapply for her adoptive rights because the initial paperwork was incorrect, contactmusic reports.

The National Enquirer in the US spoke with Ethopian adoption law expert Belay Ketema, who said the adoption could be illegal because the law in Ethiopia says that if the mother is still alive she must give her consent and in this case that may not have happened.

"The adoptive mother must appear in court to nullify the old papers and re-apply for adoption. The baby's mother must also appear to give her consent, " Keterma told the paper.

The Sun reports seamstress Dawit claims she fell pregnant after she was raped and always planned to give up the baby for adoption. Dawit's mum, Almaz Blfnhe told authorities that her daughter had died in childbirth.

In spite of the fact that Casa Alianza has filed numerous complaints over the past years regarding illicit international adoptions, and despite its efforts to put national and international pressure on the Guatemalan government to institute laws that properly regulate adoptions, the illicit adoption trade continues to thrive. Unscrupulous attorneys are the central players in this trade, and they have converted what should be a noble institution, into a dirty business.

Recently, Casa Alianza successfully reunited two young girls with their mothers, after they had been taken away from them through a deceitful scheme that took advantage of the mothers' economic needs and naiveté.

A Story of Deceit and Corruption

The first case is that of Sandra Hernández, mother of Karla, a precious little two-year-old girl. Sandra was initially approached by Susana Duarte, who plays the role of an "intermediary" in the illicit adoption trade - the person who locates mothers who appear to be good targets for taking their children away through deceit. One day, Sandra had gone to the hospital because Karla was sick, and the doctor advised her that Karla suffered from lung problems. As she left the hospital Sandra felt depressed and hopeless, and that is when Susana appeared and invited her to have coffee and even offered her work at her house. Susana expressed concern for Karla's health, and she told Sandra she would put her in contact with Mireya de Gonzalez, an attorney who would provide economic help in order to cure the child's illness.

Sandra met Ms. Gonzalez at a restaurant in Guatemala City, at which time she signed a number of blank papers after being told by Ms. Gonzalez that they were needed to admit Karla into a medical clinic where she would receive treatment for her lung problem. During the same meeting, Sandra was given a false identification card. At this point, Karla had been taken away by Susana with assurances that she would be admitted to a medical clinic. Soon after this meeting, arrangements were made for Sandra to be taken to a laboratory for the purpose of extracting some blood, the purpose of which was, she was told, to help in the treatment of Karla. However, the true purpose was to satisfy the blood test required in international adoptions which establishes the identity of a child's mother. Another requirement that needed to be accomplished was to obtain certification of Karla's birth, and this was done through a bribe paid to a dishonest midwife who then filled out the needed paperwork.

Sandra later said that nothing was ever mentioned by anyone about giving her daughter for adoption. Yet, when she asked to see Karla to verify how the treatment was going, Susana and Ms. Gonzalez refused this request, telling her that she had no rights over her daughter because she had signed papers giving up those rights.

"I almost lost my baby for 25 cents."

The second case concerns 15-year-old Sonia who is the mother of Maria, 1-year-and-8-months-old, and who is a current resident in Casa Alianza's Young Mothers' Program.

Sonia went to Family Court and filed a complaint against Maria's father for child support payments. Feeling powerless at that moment in the face of this problem, she began to cry. It was then that she was approached by Susana Duarte, the same intermediary as in the case described above, who offered help for her daughter and gave her two quetzales (the Guatemalan monetary unit, worth about 25 cents U.S.) to buy a diaper. Susana then bought her a soda and told her to drink it in order to calm herself down. Sonia does not recall noticing any strange taste in the soda, but she became extremely sleepy after drinking it. At that point Susana offered to take her to her house. By the time they arrived at Susana's house, Sonia had fallen asleep due to the apparent drugging of the soda. "I didn't wake up until the following day, and at that time Susana told me that my daughter had become sick and she had taken her to a clinic, but that I shouldn't worry because she would take me to see her later", tells Sonia.

That same day, Susana took Sonia to the City Hall in order to obtain a new birth certificate for Maria, on the pretext it was needed for the medical clinic. Then Susana said it was necessary for Sonia to donate blood for Maria because she had become seriously ill, and she was taken to the same laboratory as in the first case above. The true reason for the blood donation was to establish that Sonia is Maria's mother, a necessary step in the adoption process. Susana also insisted that Sonia register Maria in the Civil Register of the town she was born in, even though Sonia advised her that Maria had already been previously registered. Susana then put Sonia in contact with attorney Mireya de González, who required her to sign blank documents, telling her that they were needed by the clinic.

Sonia began to feel uncomfortable with these events, and she began to feel hopeless because they did not take her to see her daughter. Finally, she went to her mother for help. Her mother called Susana who told her the "if you love the little girl so much, you'll have to claim her in court because she is being adopted."

Waiting for Justice

Both of the above cases were filed with the Court of Children and Adolescents by the District Attorney and by attorneys with the Casa Alianza Legal Program. The judge assigned to the case was Casta Liliana Castañeda Flores, who ruled that the two girls be returned to their mothers. In the case of Sonia, because she is a minor, she entered Casa Alianza'a Young Mothers' Community where she is receiving shelter, protection and care for herself and her daughter.

Casa Alianza attorneys petitioned the court to prosecute Susana Duarte and Mireya de González and their associates for the crimes of child kidnapping, falsification of documents and other violations of the law. On November 11, 2005, the Judge granted the petition and initiated prosecution against these persons.

Casa Alianza denounces the irregularities that take place in many adoptions in Guatemala, where children are unscrupulously separated from their parents, many times through taking advantage of the poverty of the mother and father. Adoption is a noble institution that permits homeless children to have a family and a home, but under no circumstances should the improper separation of children from parents, such as occurred in the above cases, be allowed. Casa Alianza urges (1) the National Congress to pass legislation to protect families from such abuses, (2) the National Attorneys Association to intervene where attorneys engage in unethical and illegal conduct, and (3) the Courts of Children and Adolescence to apply the full weight of the law on those who are found to have participated in unethical and illegal acts against children and their parents.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

comunicacion2@casaalianza.org.gt Tel. (502) 2433 9600

DONGGUAN, China On a muggy evening in July 2004, on a concrete lane reeking of raw sewage and chemicals from surrounding factories, a stranger leapt from a white van. He yanked 16-month-old Fei Mei from the arms of her 8-year-old cousin and sped away.

All night, her parents searched this industrial city in southern China for their round-faced baby girl.

"We looked everywhere, on every street corner," said her father, Xu Mohu. "We thought maybe the guy wouldn't like a girl and he would abandon her."

That was once a reasonable assumption. For generations, girls in rural China have been left to die in the cold or abandoned on doorsteps while families devote their scant resources to nourishing boys. But over the past decade, a wave of foreigners, mostly Americans, has poured into China with dollars in hand to adopt Chinese babies, 95 percent of them girls.

Last year, the United States issued nearly 8,000 visas to Chinese-born children adopted by American parents. More than 50,000 children have left China for the United States since 1992. And more than 10,000 children have landed in other countries, according to Chinese reports.

The foreign adoption program has matched Chinese babies with foreign families eager for them, while delivering crucial funding to orphanages in this country. But it has also spawned a tragic irony, transforming once-unwanted Chinese girls into valuable commodities worth stealing.

The morning after Fei Mei was taken, her parents made a report at the local police station, where they learned that on the same night, another baby girl had been taken in Dongguan.

The prevalence of the problem has become clearer in recent weeks with the prosecution of a child-trafficking ring in the neighboring province of Hunan. Last November, police arrested 27 members of a ring that since 2002 had abducted or purchased as many as 1,000 children here in Guangdong province and sold them to orphanages in Hunan for $400 to $538, according to reports in Chinese state media and interviews with sources familiar with the case, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because provincial officials have ordered a media blackout. The orphanages placed most of those children in homes with unwitting foreign families, many of them Americans, in exchange for mandatory contributions of $3,000 per baby — a sum nearly twice the average annual Chinese income — according to sources familiar with the prosecution.

Last month, a court in Hunan sentenced three of those baby traffickers to 15 years in prison and imposed terms of three to 13 years on six others, the official New China News Agency reported. Twenty-three local government officials in Hengyang, the city at the center of the case, have been fired. Attorneys for those sentenced said the babies involved were abandoned and then sold to orphanages, but not abducted. They plan appeals.

On the lane where Fei Mei vanished, her parents still wonder what happened to their daughter.

"We think of her all the time," Xu said. "But chances are, we'll never see her again."

On the other side of the world, in Jenison, Mich., Susan and Gordon Toering tuck their daughter in to bed and wonder where she really came from. They adopted Stacie in August 2005 from an orphanage in Hengyang. The paperwork from the adoption agency said she had been found abandoned. But the sources familiar with the prosecution and two defense attorneys said orphanage directors faked reports to make it seem that the babies they bought had been abandoned, allowing them to gain government clearance for foreign adoptions.

The Toerings already had three older children. Evangelical Christians, they adopted in China out of a sense that they were doing something generous for a child in need.

"If there's some mother out there grieving because her baby just was taken from her, that's just so bad," Susan Toering said. "Am I feeding into this? Am I causing others to say, 'There's a market for babies?'"

Those who have studied the foreign adoption program in China say its exploitation by traffickers is not a surprising outcome in this country still transitioning from communism to capitalism, where anything profitable is quickly commercialized.

"It's a corrupt system," said Brian Stuy, a Salt Lake City resident who has adopted three Chinese girls and operates Research-China.org, which traces the origins of such children. "It's just so driven by money, and there's no check and balance to the greed."

A state agency in Beijing, the China Center of Adoption Affairs, pairs prospective adoptive families with available Chinese children. Foreigners who want to adopt must work through a foreign agency certified by the CCAA. The process entails many fees, the largest paid as parents depart the province in which they adopt: They surrender $3,000 in cash, typically in $100 bills, and usually into the hands of the orphanage director.

The CCAA declined requests for an interview. According to its guidelines, the money is given to orphanages as reimbursement for the care of adopted children. But like many government-run services in China, orphanages are prone to financial abuse.

"Perhaps 5 to 10 percent of what's given by central, provincial and local governments actually benefits the kids," said a Western aid worker who has worked in Chinese orphanages for a decade and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his organization's relationship with the Chinese government.

A former worker at an orphanage in central China said she routinely witnessed local staff members carting off goods donated by aid groups — medical equipment, blankets, formula. "The adults basically steal out of the mouths of the babies," she said.

Such is the system absorbing the proceeds from foreign adoptions. Whole industries have sprouted to service the people involved. Travel agencies ferry adopting foreign families to sightseeing spots in Beijing, then on to the provinces handling the adoptions. Playrooms occupy space at five-star hotels in cities that have become hubs for adoptions, their lobbies often packed with foreigners carrying Chinese babies. Around the White Swan hotel in Guangzhou, the city through which every family must pass to receive a U.S. visa for a child, streets are thick with stroller-rental shops and silk baby outfits embossed with traditional Chinese logos. The hotel gives each adopting family a special doll manufactured by Mattel — "Going Home Barbie," the iconic plastic figure carrying a Chinese baby.

Assuming that each family that has adopted a Chinese baby has handed over at least $3,000, Americans last year injected about $24 million into Chinese orphanages. In many instances, the money appears to be put to good use.

"In the past, the living standards were very low," said Marcia Ma, a coordinator for Project Hope, which provides medical help to orphanages throughout China. "You would go to orphanages and there was a bad smell; the children were not clean. But now there is newer equipment for medical treatment and better hygiene."

But some orphanage directors have used proceeds from foreign adoptions to build profit-making homes for senior citizens, according to aid workers and orphanage officials. And a director for an orphanage in central China used foreign contributions to send her daughter to college in Switzerland, according to a former colleague.

Little of that is evident to foreigners, who are allowed to visit only the better orphanages. When the Toerings went to Hunan to pick up Stacie last August, they wanted to visit the Hengyang City orphanage but were denied permission.

"As a mother, I needed to see where she had been for 10 months," Toering said. "The guide said it wasn't up to the standard and we weren't allowed to go."

Many families adopting in China cite a record of transparent dealings with the CCAA and the ready availability of healthy infants.

"Many come from rural areas where birth mothers don't have money to buy cigarettes and alcohol," said Lindsay Yeakley, public affairs director at Great Wall China Adoption in Austin, a nonprofit organization that has placed about 5,000 Chinese children in American homes over the past decade.

Adopting families take pride in providing needed homes. But the growth of the foreign adoption program has prevented some Chinese orphans from finding homes in China. With each healthy infant now potentially worth $3,000 to an orphanage director through a foreign adoption, many institutions have put up barriers to domestic adoptions, according to sources familiar with the process.

Last year in the city of Kunming, He Fen and her husband decided to adopt a baby girl. But when they approached the directo