Boxing without rules

The government supported the bill of the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee Elena Mizulina, which prohibits the creation of a baby boxes for anonymous abandonment of children. This was reported on the website of the member of the SF.

"The feasibility of adopting the bill is due to the need to fulfill the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, since the existence of specially created places in a number of constituent entities of the Russian Federation for leaving children after birth violates Article 6-19 and 19 of this international treaty. The Government of the Russian Federation is supported by the government, subject to its improvement," the official review of the bill is quoted.

“I am grateful to the government for supporting this bill,” Mizulina noted. “All the comments indicated in the official review can be easily eliminated by the second reading.”

On June 3, Mizulina introduced a bill on the ban on Baby Baby in Russia to the State Duma. She proposed to prescribe in the legislation that "activities aimed at organizing anonymous abandonment of children, including the creation and maintenance of specialized places for anonymous abandonment of the child, are not allowed."

The initiative also provides for liability for legal entities for creating conditions for anonymous abandonment of children. The creation by a legal entity of a baby boxes, the maintenance of such places, or the provision of premises for these purposes, entails the imposition of an administrative fine on legal entities in the amount of 1 to 5 million rubles or an administrative suspension of activities for up to 90 days, the draft law says.

In the explanatory note, Mizulin noted that the practice of anonymous abandonment of newborn children in specialized places entails an increase in the number of failures: "This trend is recorded in all countries where such a practice has or takes place." The senator also referred to a study conducted in Germany. "The main argument of supporters of the creation of a baby boxes is that they allow you to preserve the life of a newborn, prevent the murder of their child with the mother. However, according to a study conducted by the German Institute of Youth, the opportunity to anonymously hand over the child does not affect the number of cases of infanticide (murder of a newborn mother)," the document says.

The explanatory note also notes that, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the number of registered killings by the mother of a newborn child over the past 7 years in Russia has doubled. According to Mizulina, this dynamics is not associated with the presence of a baby boxes, but "with a radical change in the state policy in relation to the family, birth and education of children."

The bill is submitted to the approximate program of the autumn session of the State Duma. Its consideration is scheduled for November.

In early July, it became known that the Prosecutor General’s Office, at Mizulina’s request, began checking the legality of the installation of baby boxes in the Russian regions. At the end of June, a member of the SF demanded to conduct a prosecutor’s audit of organizations where Baby boxes were installed, including with the aim of establishing reliable information about the number of children left in them and their subsequent fate.

The request of a member of the SF to the Prosecutor General stated that the spread of the practice of using baby boxes entails many risks. Among them, Mizulina indicated "an increase in the number of refusals from newborns, a significant increase in the risks of children's trafficking, a violation of the child’s right to identity, that is, the right to know who his biological parents, the possibility of creating a shadow canal for illegal adoption of children to countries in which the adoption of Russian children is prohibited."