Dutch Feminist Monthly Magazine: OPZIJ – Summer 2013
July/August 2013
In my fight against the trade in children, I will not bow to intimidation
(informal translation from Dutch)
As Dutch civil servant at the European Commission Roelie Post was confronted with child trafficking for adoption. But if one dares to touch that issue, one gets to do with the adoption lobby.
‘People posted for my home, I was followed whereby gestures were made as if a gun was drawn. My office, at home, was broken into and I found a plastic gun on my doorstep.
Despite the intimidations and threats I refuse to compromise. Someone must have the guts to speak out for these children.
In Western countries there is more demand than adoptions are possible. In 2000 I wrote a note that intercountry adoption had become child trafficking, and that adoption was no longer done in the interest of the child. I helped with EU funding to reform the Romanian child protection, big children’s homes were closed. And adoptions from Romania were stopped. Since then they try to get me off my job. Also from inside the EU.
I am still a European civil servant, but under duress I got ‘seconded’ to Against Child Trafficking, an ngo I myself helped setting up. As only organisation we are starting court cases to bring parents again into contact with their children, who were mostly taken away from them under false pretext, or even kidnapped.
The forces behind the lobby are so enormous that normal child right organisations do not want to deal with it. But I cannot turn away from this, because otherwise nobody will do it.