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U.S. Urges Parental Follow-up Reports for Intercountry Adoptions

By Vince Crawley
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- With more than 20,000 foreign-born children being adopted by American families each year, the State Department is continuing to urge U.S. parents to provide follow-up reports requested by their children’s countries of origin, a senior diplomat says.

Also, the United States expects fully to implement the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in 2007 – a move that requires many adoption agencies to be formally accredited by the U.S. government for the first time, said Catherine Barry, deputy secretary of state for overseas citizen services.

Currently, adoption agencies are licensed and supervised by individual states. (See related article.)

In 2005, American citizens adopted 22,739 orphans from around the world, according to the State Department, which helps processes immigration paperwork for the children.

Under U.S. law, foreign-born children adopted by American parents automatically become U.S. citizens upon arrival in the United States. But countries where the children are born often require post-placement reports as part of the intercountry adoption process.

As recently as April 18, a senior Russian prosecutor was urging authorities to revoke the Russian licenses of 12 U.S. adoption agencies, alleging they had failed to file reports on the children after their adoption, the Associated Press reported. Russia was the country of origin for 4,639 children adopted by Americans in 2005, and Russian news media closely follow isolated cases where adopted Russian children have been neglected or harmed by American parents.

In March, the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs formally asked American families who have adopted from Ukraine voluntarily to file post-placement reports. In September 2005, Ukraine stopped accepting new adoption applications from the United States and five other countries, saying too many previous adoptive parents had failed to file the mandatory post-placement reports. Ukraine was the country of origin for 821 adopted children in 2005, according to the State Department.

Working with adoption agencies and advocacy groups in the United States “we started to get the word out that this is important that these families fulfill their commitment,” Barry said in an April 17 interview with the Washington File.

“With that reminder,” she said, many parents “are now producing their reports and sending them to the Embassy of Ukraine, and at this point in time the Embassy of Ukraine here [in Washington] is quite positive about the effect this reminder has had.”

FAMILY PRIVACY ISSUES

The issue of post-placement reports remains problematic because it involves family privacy, Barry said.

“From our point of view, after the adoption has occurred, the U.S. parents have full parental rights and the child has acquired U.S. citizenship,” she said. “So the U.S. government has to respect the privacy of that family unit, and so we do not have legal authority to knock on the door frequently and do a study of how family life is going and share that report with a foreign government.”

However, many parents, as part of the adoption process, voluntarily agree to provide reports to the other government, Barry said. In many cases, “the other government continues to regard this child as their national. So you have a situation of a child with two nationalities, and somewhat of a conflict between the legal framework of two different countries.”

In September 2005, countries involved in intercountry adoptions met at The Hague, Netherlands, to discuss adoption issues.

“On this issue of post-adoption reports there was quite a bit of discussion back and forth,” Barry said. “The country of origin still feels very protective of these children, and wants to make sure that they’ve done a good job in matching them with a particular family.” On the other hand, countries receiving the children grant full citizenship to avoid “treating them as second-class people.” But full citizenship means there are “certain privacy issues that come into play,” she said.

“And so there’s no way of completely accommodating both parties. The international consensus at that meeting [in The Hague] was that we the receiving countries would continue to encourage our families to cooperate with the post-adoption reporting request of the countries of origin, and that would seem to meet the interests of both parties,” Barry said.

The Hague Convention -- formally known as the Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption -- sets minimum international standards and procedures for adoptions that occur between implementing countries to ensure greater protection from exploitation for children, birth parents and adoptive parents.

This multinational treaty was approved by 66 nations on May 29, 1993, at The Hague.  The United States signed it on March 31, 1994.

The Hague Convention aims to prevent abuses such as the abduction, sale or trafficking of children, and to ensure proper consent to the adoption, as well as allowing for the child’s transfer to the receiving country and establishing the adopted child’s status in the receiving country.

As part of the ratification process, the State Department will post a list of certified U.S. adoption agencies that meet the convention requirements, Barry said.

“The role of the Department of State basically is oversight” of the intercountry adoption process, she said. The adoptions will continue to take place under the laws of the country of origin, with private U.S. agencies or individuals providing assistance.

The State Department is “not doing adoption services directly,” Barry said. “But our challenge is to have sufficient means to monitor what is going on so that we can intercede when something is off course.”

Additional information is available on the State Department Web site.