Norway considers halting overseas adoptions as Denmark’s only international organization scales back operations

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Denmark’s only overseas adoption agency announced on Tuesday that it would “scale back” its facilitation of international adoptions after government agencies raised concerns about fabricated documents and procedures that obscure the biological origins of children abroad. did.

Privately run Danish International Adoptions has brokered adoptions in the Philippines, India, South Africa, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic. Last month, the Appeals Board suspended DIA’s operations in South Africa, citing questions about DIA’s compliance with legal standards.

Danish authorities shut down international adoption businesses on the same day that Norway’s top regulatory body recommended suspending all international adoptions for two years pending investigations into several alleged illegal cases. announced that they would be withdrawing.

Some families in Europe, the United States and Australia with children adopted overseas have long warned of fraud involving infants who were mistakenly registered as abandoned orphans despite having living relatives in their home countries. is ringing.

Some adoptees claim that their documents were falsified to facilitate their transfer abroad or were prepared in ways that obscured their backgrounds or made them difficult to trace. International law, including in Denmark, generally encourages keeping children in their home country as much as possible.

Denmark’s Ministry of Social Affairs called the closure of DIA, which also collaborated with partner agencies in South Korea, Colombia and other countries, “the most serious crisis in the adoption field in a decade.”

Social Affairs Minister Pernile Rosencrantz Teil said: “When bringing a child into a new family on the other side of the world, there must be the necessary guarantees that the adoption will take place properly in relation to the biological parents.” Stated.

Over the past decade, international recruitment in Denmark has declined. In the 1970s, about 400 to 500 children were born each year, and in the past three years there have been 20 to 40 adoptions, according to the DIA.

In Norway, Minister for Children and Families Gjersti Toppe said she believed further investigation was needed and had asked Norway’s Directorate General for Children, Youth and Family Affairs to do so.

“Adoption must be safe, sound and in the best interests of the child,” Hege Nilsen, director of the Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Families, said in a statement. “In our assessment, the risk of illegal activity is real.”

The department said families in the early stages of the adoption process will be allowed to complete the process, but only after evaluation by the agency. Couples matched with children from South Korea will also be allowed to proceed.

According to national statistics, the majority of children adopted in Norway are from South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Colombia.

Earlier this month, the department said an investigation into the adoption system was needed following media reports about suspected illegal adoptions. Norway’s VG newspaper reported that some children were trafficked in the Philippines and given fake birth certificates.

In November, the agency also suspended adoptions from Madagascar, citing a lack of security for adoptions to be “carried out in accordance with international principles of adoption.”

There are three private adoption agencies in Norway. Verdens Barn handles adoptions from Thailand, Korea, and South Africa. InorAdopt arranges the adoption of children from Hungary, Taiwan, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. Adoptionsforum facilitates the adoption of children from the Philippines, Colombia, and Peru.

Sweden’s only adoption agency announced in November that it would suspend adoptions from South Korea after claims that documents regarding the origins of children adopted from the Asian country were falsified.