A shock report, produced by two historians and published Monday, February 6, wonders about the “systemic” character of the irregularities that have persisted in around twenty countries, for more than thirty years.
By Morgane the cam
Pandora’s box is open. If, in recent years, the multiplication of French testimonies claiming that it has been illegally adopted abroad suggests that the drifts were numerous in France, the “historical study on the illicit practices of international adoption in France” , published Monday February 6 by historians Fabio Macedo and Yves Denechère, draws up an even more freezing inventory.
“One can wonder about the ordinary of illicit practices and their systemic character”, underline the two researchers attached to the University of Angers, with whom the Ministry of Foreign Affairs signed an agreement in December 2021 for Allow the development of this independent research report.
“Children’s traffic” and “irregular adoptions” in Chile, Paraguay and Peru, “monthly annuity” proposed to biological parents in exchange for their child in India, “corruption and fraud of documents” in Cambodia, ” RAPTS “,” Manufacture of false orphans “and forced abandonment” of newborns by very young mothers “to respond to” the demand of French parents “in Madagascar … Their study, developed from 9,600 pages of archives Taken from state diplomatic funds, most of them classified, establishes that many illicit adoptions have been made in more than twenty countries since 1979, despite the incessant alerts addressed by consular services to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Individual adoptions, which allowed until their ban, in February 2022, to French couples to adopt alone, are not the only ones to have been the subject of drifts. The 150 pages of account of this study reveal that the adoptions accompanied by the associations authorized by the Quai d’Orsay, supposed to protect candidates from these irregularities, also experienced their share of fraud. Fifteen organizations authorized for adoption (OAA) are implicated in the report. Five of them are still today approved by the State.
“A real market”
Thus, in Vietnam, in 1994, the OAA Comexseo was accused by the French Consulate of “Monnayer directly with their biological parents” certain adopted children, as it specifies in a letter addressed to the adoption mission International (May) of the Quai d’Orsay, the body responsible for controlling the adoptions carried out by the OAA. Despite the reports, Comexseo will remain empowered by the State until 2009.
International adoptions in Vietnam, briefly suspended in 1999, at the “continuation of numerous drifts and proven illicit practices”, will resume the following year, despite the persistence of irregularities. “Imagine these Vietnamese children who, at 18, want to know the conditions in which they were adopted and who discover that their parents bought them,” prophesied the French ambassador during a meeting with May in 2000. Despite despite The alert of the diplomat, the country will remain open to adoptions until today, becoming the main destination for French international candidates with more than 12,100 children adopted since 1979.
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