Last week Vietnamese officials met to review the three years of US-VN adoptions under the Agreement which is to expire on September 1st. The Vietnamese press published three articles on this meeting online, including an interview with the Head of the Ministry of Justice’s International Adoption Agency, Vu Duc Long.
The first article, “Tougher adoption regulations needed” highlights the recent investigation and arrests in Nam Dinh. Apparently it was something of a turning point for Vietnamese officials.
DIA’s Vice Head Le Thi Hoang Yen said: “We are very worried with the recent fake adoption documents. We had been confident about the legitimacy of documents appraised by police. But in recent cases in Nam Dinh Province, there were fakes which police appraised.
The second article is a brief summary of the status of the U.S.-VN Agreement and includes the following statistics:
By the end of July, about 1,700 disadvantaged Vietnamese children had been adopted by American families, reported the agency.
Over the past three years, 42 adoption organizations in the U.S. have offered humanitarian supports worth US$5.5 million to a lot of children in many provinces and cities in Viet Nam, the conference was told.
The third article, an interview with Dr. Long, is more detailed and provides some insight into possible restructuring plans. It also gives reassurance to families with children from Nam Dinh:
There will be no change for the children who were adopted. The violators in Vietnam will be penalised, the adopted children will not be brought back to Vietnam.
Dr. Long explained that some document forgeries are very hard to discern because they are done at the district level, when the child enters the orphanage. He voiced concerns about district-level orphanges:
What do you think about provinces permitting the establishment of orphanages which are very poor in facilities?
The orphanage in Nam Dinh is a district-level unit, while district-level management is very poor. This is a lesson. Some provinces have inspected local orphanages and closed down some units, for example the Viet Lam orphanage in Phu Tho province.Some orphanages in southern provinces are being inspected. If district-level orphanages don’t have good facilities and are not managed well, they will be closed.
He also gave general information about plans for restructuring the Vietnamese process:
The strongest solution is the issuance of the Law on Adoption. This law will basically change the management mechanism. Accordingly, the direct relations between orphanages and international adoption agencies will be abolished. Central agencies will directly manage adoption activities and relations with adoptive parents.
In addition, a national unified adoption assistance fund will be set up to diminish financial ambiguity and the ability to seek profit from adoption at grassroots agencies.
The power to make decisions currently belongs to orphanages and locations where the orphanages are located. This power will be centralised.
As we read these three accounts we see a continuing message: Vietnam acknowledges that there has been a problem in the international adoption system that has operated in its country. To see these three stories printed in the Vietnamese press, in some capacity acknowledging that the situation needs to change, reporting that charges were being filed against Vietnamese orphanage director Tran Thi Luong, calling for a centralized system and an abolishment of the direct relationship between orphanage and agency are all posititve steps.
Yet, there are still major concerns that arrise even as we see positive steps. In the interview Dr. Long admits that there is very litte recourse for families whose children have been kidnapped:
So who will be sued by families who lose their children?
If their children are kidnapped, they have to sue the kidnappers or those who lend a hand to the kidnappers. We have the Law on Human Trafficking Prevention. In the case in Nam Dinh, it is very difficult to prove kidnapping.
Dr. Long also admits that counterfeit documents are very difficult to verify:
Provincial Departments of Justice are in charge of checking and approving adoption files, so what is their responsibility if violations are detected?
It depends on the seriousness of violations. But it is very difficult to verify adoption documents if they are sophisticated counterfeits, because criminals begin forging documents when children enter orphanages.
Furthermore, the second article, Vietnam-US Adoption Agreement to end Sept. 1, recognizes another major problem that has existed in Vietnam adoptions:
“a lack of financial transparency and fierce competition among American adoption organizations have resulted in incorrect information that affects the humanitarian nature of the adoption, said the agency.
Many (if not all) of the problems we see in Vietnam adoptions today are the same as those that preceded the prior shutdown. While initially many thought that Vietnam’s process was centralized enough to prevent a recurrance of those issues, it is clear that too many loopholes remained. The question now is, does Vietnam have the will and the ability to close those loopholes?
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