https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/netherlands-international-adoptions.htmlThe Netherlands has temporarily halted all adoptions from abroad after an investigation found that the government had failed to act on known abuses, including child theft and trafficking, between 1967 and 1998.
“Adoptees deserve recognition for mistakes that were made in the past,” Sander Dekker, the minister for legal protection, said on Monday, as the results of the investigative report were made public. “They have to be able to count on our help in the present. And for the future we have to critically ask ourselves if and how to continue adoption from abroad.”
The government formed an independent commission in 2018 to look into international abuses after a lawsuit showed that the Dutch government had been involved in an illegal adoption from Brazil in 1980, and pointed to the possibility of more such cases. Experts said they knew of no other Western country that had stopped international adoptions.
In its report, the commission said it had found systematic wrongdoing, including pressuring poor women to give up their babies, falsifying documents, engaging in fraud and corruption, and, in effect, buying and selling children. In some cases, the Dutch government was aware of misdeeds in adoptions from Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, but did nothing about them and allowed them to continue, the report said.
“The intercountry adoption system itself served as a kind of ‘child-laundering’ mechanism, as children who were put up for adoption under suspect circumstances could be transformed into legitimately adopted children,” the commission reported. It described the creation of an adoption market and the conversion of children into “tradable goods,” a system that could be “categorized as an abuse.”
The government froze new applications for international adoptions, though pending adoptions can be completed, Mr. Dekker said.
The question of when and how to resume adoptions from abroad will be up to the next government. Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the rest of his cabinet resigned last month, and elections for a new Parliament are scheduled next month.
