This article come from a weekly English-written newspaper of Honduras.
Also found online at: www.hondurasthisweek.com
From Issue Saturday, February 24, 2007
(I know it's long, but totally worth reading)
Adoption laws working to the interests of abandoned children?
Sasha Arms
Honduras This Week
According to UNICEF, the focus needs to shift from couples wanting to adopt to children needing a family.
Just 50 adoptions took place in Honduras in 2005. There are 40,000children in orphanages and temporary custody in the country, yet the Honduran Institute of Children and the Family (IHNFA) claim that there are always more potential parents than there are available children. There is no official adoption law in Honduras, just a set of guidelines which were formed in 1958. There have been cases where it has taken parents up to eight years to adopt their child. Is there a brighter future for abandoned children in Honduras?
“It is absolutely critical that the Honduran State passes the ‘Special Law on Adoption’,” pronounces Marta Obando Salgado, Child Protection Official of UNICEF Honduras. “We are talking about the lives of children here and no-one else other than the State should decide on the futures of these vulnerable children,” she adds. In fact, the fourth draft of the adoption law is currently being reviewed and is due to be discussed in civil society forums later this year. However, the international UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has made an urgent recommendation to Honduras this month that the process to adopt the Adoption Law is speeded up as a matter of absolute priority.
The matter is so urgent because the current system is in disarray, even by the admission of Doris Garcia, Director of IHNFA: “IHNFA have not been handling the adoption process in Honduras effectively until now. Improvements need to be made to the whole process and once the new law is implemented we will have guidelines to make this happen.” At the moment, IHNFA follow a standardized set of procedures. When IHNFA has a potential candidate for adoption, they first search for close or distant relatives of the said child. If no family is found, the child’s case is presented to a Judge, who then has the power to declare a child as officially ‘abandoned’. The abandoned child is then sent to a temporary family and IHNFA meet
with the children individually to find out more about them to ensure their needs are met – how they grew up, if they’d like to live with a new family and their aspirations for the future. IHNFA then searches for a suitable adoptive family – suitable adoptive parents must be aged 25-50, register the correct moral values, be able to provide an adequate family environment and be Honduran by birth. A family court can than pronounce an adoption as ‘legal’.
“There are not many changes we need to make to the current rules when the new law is passed, “Garcia maintains, “but the biggest problem we have to tackle is the length of time it takes for an adoption to take place,” she adds. Marta Obando of UNICEF agrees with this point: “The long period of time involved in the current adoption process seriously affects the emotional health of the child. This new legal bill has been discussed for 5 years now, and one thing that has not been agreed on is how long the process should take while adequately guaranteeing the rights of the child during the proceedings.” It takes an average of 16-18 months for an adoption to be completed, although it can as easily take years. “There are obstacles everywhere,” Garcia states, “Judges, attorneys, and in IHNFA itself.” IHNFA has a particular problem when potential adoptive families live far away from IHNFA headquarters in Tegucigalpa.
Garcia explains, “IHNFA does not have the financial resources to send staff to investigate potential adoptive families who live far away, for example in La Moskita or the Bay Islands. Sometimes those families offer to pay the transport costs for IHNFA, but IHNFA is not allowed to accept money from them. So these families have to wait for a time when IHNFA does have the resources, which can also take years.”
A key question that remains to be answered is why so few adoptions take place, when there are so many children in temporary homes and orphanages in Honduras. Again, Garcia puts this down to the current system: “Before a child can be declared eligible for adoption, a Judge must pronounce them as ‘abandoned’ – either if they are orphans or if their family has signed papers to agree to this.” Many orphanages do not know that they could present a child’s case to a judge, but a greater sticking point is that someone needs to pay for legal representation for this to happen. Resource-strapped orphanages simply do not have this kind of money.
Another paradox is the position of foreign nationals who wish to adopt Honduran children. Although the current guidelines explicitly stipulate that abandoned children should go to Honduran families, 80% of adoptions are actually to foreign nationals. “We always look
for Honduran families first, but if we can’t find a suitable family we look at international applicants,” Garcia states. However, the process for foreign applicants can be even more grueling. Pastor Marlene Alfaro has a stream of North American parents who want to adopt Honduran children come to stay with her. They go through the same lengthy processes as Hondurans, except it is often the US Embassy that causes problems in the adoptions. Alfaro explains: “The US Embassy will not issue an exit visa to children who are over the age of 16. I had a North American couple stay with me as they wanted to adopt Jessica. It took them years to go through the procedures, which they finally completed. However, their appointment with the US Embassy was on Jessica’s 16th Birthday and so she was denied entry into the States. Now Jessica lives with me.” She goes on to say: “It is heart-breaking. These people from
abroad want to help our children, we should be making it so much easier for them.”
However, UNICEF have a different view on international adoptions. “The reason the guidelines stipulate that adoptive parents are Honduran is for cultural reasons, but also for systems of monitoring the children,” Salgado identifies. “As Honduras has not signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the government has no rights to monitor the progress of children who are adopted and live in other countries. There have been cases where Honduran children
have died in their new foreign homes, or have been victims of abuse. This is why it is so critically important that Honduras ratifies this treaty, as all signatories of the Convention have to monitor crosscountry adoptions.”
The adoption process in Honduras is currently a tangled web of obstacles, miscommunication and red tape. The lack of legal status for adoption in Honduras is the reason many people blame the chronic problems on, so once the new law is passed there are high hopes that the system will witness a complete overhaul. Additionally however, there are other points that UNICEF think need monitoring. There is a tendency when talking about adoption to focus on the troubles of parents trying to adopt. “We need to keep a focus on children waiting to have parents and families, rather than parents waiting to have children,” Obando reminds us. “There is also a tendency for people to think that poverty should be a reason for adoption, but it should not be at all,” she ascertains. “It is a common cultural opinion that if a mother is poor and doesn’t have the economic resources to maintain her child, then it is acceptable for her to put the child up for adoption. But in fact the government should be trying to strengthen family ties and support families by implementing micro-business opportunities for example.”
It is often the case that children simply live with carers rather than going through the whole adoption process, and from the state of the adoption system, it is easy to see why. Nevertheless, it is imperative that children are adopted, so that they acquire the legal rights associated with having a legal guardian. Now only time will tell whether the new law will be sufficient to give the thousands of needy children the homes they deserve and desperately need. Adoption laws working to the interests of abandoned children? Natalia Sandoval According to UNICEF, the focus needs to shift from couples wanting to adopt to children needing a family.
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