The US embassy in Vietnam released a report yesterday detailing pervasive corruption in the country’s international adoption system, prompting angry denials from the Vietnamese government.
The nine-page report by the embassy’s Consular Investigations unit charges that some Vietnamese orphanages pay parents to put their children up for adoption in order to obtain donations from foreign adoption service providers, who fund most of the orphanages’ budgets.
The report says foreign adoption agencies’ contributions are sometimes embezzled by orphanage officials, while another US report detailed 10 cases of egregious abuse, including babies put up for adoption without their parents’ consent.
The head of Vietnam’s Department of International Adoptions categorically denied the charges and stated that his agency had never seen a case of baby selling or fraud related to international adoption.
“They can say whatever they want,” said Vu Duc Long. “It’s like the human rights issue. The US side says that Vietnam violates human rights, but Vietnam doesn’t.”
Long said the only cases of baby trafficking discovered by police in Vietnam were destined for regional countries like China and were not related to official international adoption procedures.
“The report speaks for itself,” US embassy spokesperson Angela Aggeler said. “The information we have gathered over a long period of time, looking at hundreds of cases, make us feel confident that our report is accurate.”
The US report says adoption fraud stems partly from the requirement under Vietnamese law that foreign adoption service providers (ASPs) must provide funding to a Vietnamese orphanage in order to receive adoption referrals from that orphanage. Agreements between orphanages and ASPs require the orphanage to refer a set proportion of children for adoption in exchange for donations from the foreign ASP.
When the orphanages do not have enough children to refer, they come under pressure to find more, since foreign ASPs are their principal source of funds.
The report lists cases in which prospective adoptees were falsely reported to have been abandoned by unknown parents, in order to prevent US embassy officials from verifying that the parents had not been coerced or paid, a requirement under the US-Vietnamese agreement on international adoption. In some cases, the report alleges babies were put up for adoption by hospitals when parents were unable to pay their medical bills.
In other cases, the report says parents were promised payments averaging more than US$300 in exchange for signing papers putting their children up for adoption.
The US’ current agreement on adoption with Vietnam is scheduled to expire on Sept. 1. The US insists that a future agreement allows DNA checking for the parents of the adoptees and spontaneous US investigations without the consent of provincial governments, conditions the Vietnamese side has refused to meet.
The US embassy also issued a recommendation yesterday that US parents not initiate any new adoption procedures from Vietnam.
The US issued over 800 adoption visas to children from Vietnam last year and has issued more than 300 so far this year.
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS