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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The
RSS