Romania will not change adoption rules

Romania is fighting all the internal pressure to open up adoptions.

President of the Office for Adoptions says Romania does not plan to allow international adoptions since the domestic demand is higher than the number of the children ready for adoption.

published in issue 3735 page 5 at 2006-08-02

BUCHAREST - The Romanian authorities remain firm on keeping the current legislation governing inter-country adoptions, Theodora Bertzi, President of the Romanian Office for Adoptions (ORA), stated yesterday, while expressing her doubt that a relaxation in the area of such adoptions would lead to a more flexible regime of obtaining visas for the US.

Referring to the adoption by the US Senate of a new resolution on the resuming of international adoptions by Romania on the very day when President Basescu left for the US on an official visit, Bertzi explained that the resolution was identical to the one passed in April this year by the House of Representatives, its signors asking for the amending of Law 273 (2004) on the regime of adoptions as well as the assessment of over 200 cases of Romanian children in connection with which the Romanian authorities had completed reports as early as March.

Moreover, the President of ORA explained that the foreign families whose applications could not be processed received their papers back together with information about the circumstances of the child.

The resolution urges the Romanian officials ‘to give priority to the best interest of the child’ and allow inter-country adoption not only by relatives of the child but also by families who wish to adopt children from Romania. The document expresses the position of the House of Representatives and is not legally binding’, added Bertzi.

“A sovereign state cannot be blackmailed in that way. We know that we will not change the legislation in the area,” stated Bertzi, reminding that for the first time President Basescu had adopted a very decisive attitude on that.

In fact, the ORA president stressed that the resolution as well as the entire lobby so far for the resumption of international adoptions had not been authored by the governments of the states in question, but by the various NGOs or members of parliament who paid huge amounts to have their press articles published, making reference to Romanian children and advocating the resumption of adoptions.

According to Theodora Bertzi, 30,000 Romanian children have been adopted internationally after 1990, around 35 per cent of them to the US, while only a few hundreds were adopted from Hungary or the Czech Republic. In Romania there are 2,200 families declared eligible for domestic adoptions and only 1,300 children with an open adoption procedure.

by Cornelia Nitoi