Russia moves to restrict foreign adoptions

By Oliver Bullough
Tue May 23, 10:39 AM ET

Moscow will stop foreigners adopting children outside officially registered agencies in a step toward limiting the number of children who leave Russia, a top government official said on Tuesday.

In comments carried by Russian news agencies, Sergei Apatenko, head of the Education Ministry's youth department, said the move would protect vulnerable children from adoption by inappropriate families.

Such a step has long been demanded by nationalist lawmakers shocked by a series of well-publicized murders of Russian children abroad -- mainly in the United States.

Many have demanded a complete ban on foreigners adopting Russians -- although observers say this is prompted more by wounded national pride than by a desire to protect the thousands of children eligible for adoption.

They say it is part of a campaign against foreign interference in the country, which has included restrictions on foreign funding of charities, which officials have accused of having links to foreign spies.

Apatenko said all problems experienced with foreign adoptions had been caused by people organizing adoptions without an official mediator.

"These families probably also appealed to adoption agencies, however they appealed to agencies not accredited in Russia, which did not provide the authorities with information about what conditions the child will experience abroad," he said.

"Our duty is to create conditions so it is easier for Russians to adopt children in our country, and so children left without parents remain in Russia and do not go abroad."

The law should be passed by the end of the year, he said.

The tens of thousands of children available for adoption in Russia often live in poorly funded orphanages. Activists say as many as 2 million other orphans may live without state help.

A Web site set up by the Education Ministry (www.usynovite.ru) allows potential parents to pick the age, sex, and color of eyes and hair in their child. The site had 153,267 children in its database on Tuesday.

Approximately half of the 15,000 children adopted a year go abroad, with activists saying foreigners often take the most vulnerable and damaged children.

But Svetlana Goryacheva, a deputy from the State Duma lower house of parliament who had led the fight against foreign adoptions, said the ministry's move was not enough.

"There is fierce competition between accredited and non-accredited agencies," she told Ekho Moskvy radio, saying the official ones were as much to blame for the 12 murders of Russian children adopted by foreigners listed in recent years.

"The only difference between them is that one has accreditation and the other does not," she said.