BBC Report - Ambassador Taubman

BBC reported that on Wednesday (May 24 - 2006) the US Ambassador to Bucharest criticized the existing adoption law from many angles. It said that the Ambassador said that Romania cannot afford, for political reasons, to renounce international adoptions, when it faces an increase in the number of abandoned children. Under such conditions, said Taubman, it is not natural for domestic adoptions to be so difficult, or for authorities to provide temporary solutions such as foster care. Likewise, Ambassador Taubman said that the solution of reintegrating a child into his family, if the family can be found, will not always be successful, because in many cases the minors end up back in state care again. Finally, the U.S. Ambassador said that the law hasn't achieved its goal of ending the sale of children abroad.

"It would be naïve to say that national laws or the European Union will end all cases of abuse. Whatever the law might be today, it needs to be changed, because many of the children who have become targets of acts of corruption or who have been sold are those born without identity papers," said the U.S. Ambassador to Bucharest.

The report added that Ambassador Taubman specified that "anything is possible in a country where mothers run away from hospitals and therefore the children they abandon don't immediately receive an identity."

The Director of the Romanian Adoption Office, Theodora Bertzi, acknowledges that sometimes there are problems related to the establishment of the identity of abandoned minors, but those problems are due to ignorance of the law, not to any insufficiency in the law. Mrs. Bertzi rejects the idea that for this reason, children might be sold. "Suspicions, there have been rumors and suspicions, nothing proven," Theodora Bertzi declared, adding: "I cannot believe that such a practice occurs regularly. If there are such attempts, they must be stopped immediately."

The Director of the Romanian Adoption Office confirmed that in Romania, domestic adoptions are much quicker than in the United States, and any slowing of procedure is only due to the fact that people are seeking the very best solutions for children. Finally, Theodora Bertzi insisted that in Romania, children are not forced to reintegrate into their families of origin. She said this in response to Ambassador Taubman's statement that several minors were returned to "alcoholic or drug-addicted" mothers who later sent them back to orphanages.