| The State Duma is looking for a new guardian for Russian orphans The heated discussions of recent months regarding international adoption logically ended with the consideration of this painful issue in the State Duma. As State Duma Deputy Speaker Vladimir Katrenko said yesterday, deputies intend to approach the issue as decisively as the Prosecutor General's Office and will draw up an appeal to Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov. The most radical legislators are demanding a moratorium on adoption, while realists are going to ask the head of government to transfer powers in the field of guardianship and trusteeship from the “at fault” Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Health and Social Development. This, according to deputies, will help create a “system of placement” of orphans to be raised primarily in families of Russian citizens.
Following the leadership of the Prosecutor General's Office, parliamentarians explain their position by concern for the fate of 64 thousand Russian children adopted by foreigners. However, the President and CEO of the US National Council on Adoption, Thomas Atwood, believes that the concerns of the State Duma and law enforcement are unfounded and that based on several truly egregious cases of treatment of children in foster families, one cannot draw a conclusion about the situation as a whole. Mr. Atwood, who yesterday met with Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky, assured that the 49 thousand Russian children adopted by citizens of his country “live a good and happy life.” "They get a good education, good medical care and have loving parents," he said. In addition, Thomas Atwood apologized to Russian citizens for those children who suffered from foster parents and expressed hope that “such people will be seriously punished.”
At the same time, the US representative agreed with the need to improve the mechanism for monitoring the fate of adopted orphans from Russia, and in particular to reduce the time for submitting the first report on the child’s stay in the new family. Currently, according to Russian law, such reports are drawn up six months after adoption. Although it is during this period of time, according to statistics, that it becomes clear whether adoptive parents are capable of becoming exemplary parents for an orphan - the majority of deaths in new families were recorded in the first six months. "We are proposing that adoption reports be sent in the first, third and sixth months after the children arrive," said Thomas Atwood, asking the deputy attorney general to "not stop international adoptions to protect the children."
However, Sergei Fridinsky's views on Russian-American cooperation in this area do not seem to be so optimistic. Mr. Fridinsky complained that US authorities do not always support Russian law enforcement agencies during investigations into unlawful actions of adoptive parents against children. “In response to a number of requests, law enforcement agencies in several states responded that they were afraid of cooperating with us because it could harm international institutions,” he said. Moreover, the Prosecutor General's Office intends to terminate the activities in Russia of 30 of the 52 agencies accredited by the Ministry of Education, which, according to Mr. Fridinsky, violate Russian legislation on adoption. As for the Russian intermediaries, they too will be held accountable. “Since we do not have responsibility for intermediary activities, we will hold them accountable for illegal business,” Fridinsky explained. We are talking about two criminal cases that were opened in the Perm and Irkutsk regions on the facts of the murder in America of Vika Bazhenova and Daniil Ulitsky. Irina BELASHEVA |
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