Congressional letter to Almazbek Atambaev, Omurbek Babanov and Muktar Djumaliev

Dear President Atambaev, Prime Minister Babanov, and Ambassador Djumaliev:

As you well know, in 2008 Kyrgyzstan halted its international adoption process leaving children who had been matched with families in the United States caught in a transition that followed with an unclear future. For the past four years, our Department of State has worked closely with your Ministry of Social Protection (now the Ministry of Social Development) to reach an agreement on how to unite these children with their prospective adoptive parents. Throughout the entirety of these negotiations, we were led to believe — along with the U.S. Department of State and the prospective adoptive parents — that these adoptions would be allowed to continue once the appropriate system of processing was in place. We were encouraged when your government passed legislation to update the Family Codes and drafied regulations that would allow for intercountry adoption to continue. We were also pleased to learn that the Ministry of Social Development recently licensed the first U.S. adoption service provider.

However, it has recently come to our attention that at least eight of these children who were matched with U.S. families have been adopted domestically. We are not only surprised, but very disappointed by this outcome, especially given the long-standing and diligent communications that have taken place between our nations at the highest levels. While we believe that domestic adoption is a positive placement for a child, these children had established relationships with prospective adoptive parents they had come to know and love. It makes little sense to us why these children were given priority for domestic adoption over the thousands of other children who could have benefitted from this intervention.

We write to respectfully request that for the welfare of the children involved, all of the remaining pending U.S. cases move forward expeditiously under your new process for intercountry adoptions with the families that have waited for and loved these children for years.

We appreciate your attention to this matter.

Respectfully,

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