Romania cracks down on trade of orphan babies to the West

Published on Monday 4 October 2004 00:52

ROMANIAN authorities have confirmed that scores of people, including at least three British couples, are being investigated for allegedly using a legal loophole to buy babies from Romania.

Romania banned adoptions abroad in 2001 following pressure from the European Union.

In an effort to enforce the ban, the government recently authorised tough penalties of up to seven years in jail for families who accept money or other goods in exchange for giving up a child.

But Romanian prime minister Adrian Nastase has now ordered a special investigation after it was revealed that large sums of money were still changing hands to help those wanting to bypass the ban to find suitable children and use legal loopholes to smuggle them abroad.

Mr Nastase said the loophole involved foreign men assuming paternity for Romanian children that gave them the right to take a child out of the country in defiance of the ban.

Police are investigating dozens of cases involving people from countries such as Turkey, Italy, Hungary, Iran, Germany, France, Spain, Greece and the UK, but believe the real number could be in the hundreds.

A spokesman for the organised crime department said: "We cannot give concrete details while investigations are ongoing, but we can confirm that we are now fighting such a modus operandum.

"Every day we get new information. We are looking at three cases involving UK families, but we cannot reveal any names or details.

"We are looking at cases where the man claimed to be the father of a child where no father was named on the birth certificate. In each case these children are now living abroad."

The spokesman said the cases were suspicious because they involved foreign citizens who declared paternity of babies a long time after their birth.

He also warned that the problem might be worse, since those allegedly fixing the deals might also have been arranging babies to order, setting up deals with pregnant women to hand over a child as soon as it was born, then putting the name of the foreign father on the birth certificate straight away.

"We have been investigating these cases since June this year and maternity wards and city halls have been carefully checked," he said, adding that checks were being made to see if DNA tests could be made to confirm the paternity claims.

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned contraception and abortion under his regime. When it fell in 1989 almost 100,000 abandoned children were left in neglected homes and institutions. Many couples from the West offered to adopt children after seeing television pictures.

Today, almost 40,000 children remain in the state system as poverty ensures a ready supply of new babies.

In response to the latest allegations and revelations that even the government has allowed almost 200 babies to be classified as "exceptions" to the foreign adoptions ban, the government has authorised a strengthening of it, closing the legal loopholes and removing another obstacle to EU membership in 2007.

It will effectively make foreign adoptions of Romanian babies almost impossible from January of next year, as Romanian children can only be adopted by a family living abroad if one of the adoptive parents is the grandmother or grandfather of the child.