14 July 2019
Many may know my story. The life of a whistleblower. Read about it here.
The European Commission still continues to try to fully destroy my professional and personal life.
I am still here though. To tell my story, which is the story of Romania’s children. A story I tell with pain in my heart.
In 2004 Romania banned intercountry adoptions, as a condition for EU Accession. The adoption world trembled… would the rest of the ‘sending countries’ follow Romania’s example. Or be forced by the European Union to do the same?
Romania’s ban was a logic result after the EU had spent some 50 million EU-funding on the reform of Romania’s child protection. Most large old-style institutions had been closed and replaced by family-style homes and fostercare. Like the babyhome in the picture.
The European Commission had made clear, with the help of an Independent Panel of EU Experts, that
Romania had agreed to that.
But the United States and some of their allies and front-offices had not. Also the adoption agencies in the EU and the US were afraid to lose their bread and butter: the sale of children for adoption.
While formally the EU said that they did not deal with the subject of intercountry adoptions anymore, since Romania’s EU Membership in 2007, the opposite was true.
Bit by bit they passed the message to Romania that re-opening intercountry adoptions was fine with them. Part of that was described in the blog of Against Child Trafficking.
Romania re-opened slowly, only to Romanians abroad. The first US adoption took place in 2014.
The adoption industry, in order to legalise the sale of children for adoption corrupted children’s rights by creating an alternative interpretation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, being the Hague Adoption Convention.
The tactics used by the adoption industry to keep their business going entails conducting public relations campaigns, buying scientific and other expertise to promote their pro-adoption biased view on children’s rights, funding political parties, hiring lobbyists to influence policy, using front groups and allied NGO’s to align national child rights’ law worldwide with their pro-adoption vision and to prevent the inclusion of adoption into the trafficking definition in order to prevent criminal investigation.
The US also had some allies inside the European Commission and the European Parliament (proof on file).
So the US and the EU, helped by front-offices such as Eurochild, Better Care Network and the (unofficial) European Expert Group on the Transition from Institutional to Community-based Care (EEG) pushed for ‘de-institutionalisation’, without ever using the word adoption. So did Unicef. And Hope & Homes, and Lumos. And, last but not least SERA. And Amici dei Bambini. All with EU-funding or other support.
They work on the basis of the Hague Adoption Convention, not the UNCRC. And thus they don’t consider fostercare or residential care as suitable care.
It can only be temporary. All children must be either return to their biological family, or adopted.
That’s why Sorina could no longer be raised by her fosterfamily, where she had such a good life.
That is not what the world agreed to when they drafted the UNCRC.
No. It is the American view of children’s rights. The right to be adopted. And consumers to be protected.
That is the mechanism we see at work in Romania now, by sending Sorina to the US. Despite fake paperwork. Despite having been raised by a lovely fosterfamily. Despite her mother not agreeing that she goes abroad. Despite having a brother in Romania.
A sad state of affairs.
The below video was made as part of the public awareness campaign of the EU Phare programme in 2003, in an attempt to show the world that Romania can look after its children. And to counter the negative images that the adoptionlobby kept spreading.