Orphanages brim, but Russia thwarts foreign adoption
This week, the last of 89 foreign-based adoption agencies failed to get reaccreditation.
from the April 19, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Some Russian adoptees abused
Defenders of the government crackdown say it's about improving accountability and providing safeguards for Russian children who are adopted abroad. They cite claims that at least 14 Russian kids adopted in the US and Canada have died over the past decade, victims of parental abuse. Earlier this year a group of nationalist and Communist deputies attempted to pass a bill in the Duma – the lower house of parliament – to halt foreign adoptions, but failed to gain support from the pro-Kremlin majority.
"We wanted to pass a moratorium on international adoptions, but our colleagues at the foreign ministry told us it violated international practice," says Nina Ostanina, deputy head of the Duma's commission on family affairs. "What we want now is to obtain bilateral agreements with countries that will enable us to be able to follow the adopted child's life abroad. As of now, Russian embassy workers are denied such access."
Some critics believe that nationalist politicians may be using the adoption issue to embarrass Putin and push Russian politics in an anti-Western direction. "Very strong, very dangerous forces are behind this [campaign to end international adoptions]. They want a new Iron Curtain, a new Cold War," says Boris Altschuler, director of Children's Right, a Moscow-based NGO that monitors conditions for children. "It's very possible that all these bureaucratic obstacles are, at their roots, really political ones."
For the agencies, including many that have worked in Russia for more than a decade, the new rules come atop almost two years of escalating restrictions. In 2005, a forced reregistration of all foreign agencies caused a similar shutdown in adoptions, but the bottleneck magically disappeared after 7,000 American families waiting to adopt Russian children signed an open letter to President Vladimir Putin, which was published in the central newspaper Izvestia.
Are delays due to anti-Americanism?
"We've been going around this circle for years now," says Natasha Shaginian, executive director of the New York-based Happy Families International adoption agency, whose Russian accreditation expired last May. "The government keeps making the same problems with the accreditation process. Ministries keep coming up with new requirements, which makes it harder and harder. We've got many families waiting, some for two years, and there's nothing we can do."
Ms. Shaginian also cites what she calls political pressures. "Anti-Americanism is growing in Russia very fast," she says. "If anything happens with a child in the States, it creates a huge scandal here in Russia. For American agencies working here, the situation is ... difficult."
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