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Adoptions from India under scrutiny

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Adoptions from India under scrutiny

August 26, 2008

THE State Government is reviewing the adoptions of two children arranged through an Indian agency accused of stealing "pretty" children from slums and trafficking them internationally.

A spokesman for Community Services Minister Lisa Neville said two children were adopted through the Chennai-based agency, Malaysian Social Services, in September 1992, but no further adoptions were organised after that time.

The adoption agency was at the centre of a recent Time magazine investigation that alleged up to 30 children may have been wrongfully adopted from India through the agency in the past 15 years, including 13 to Australia.

Indian officials are reportedly investigating the case of a girl who was taken from her parents in 2000 and adopted by a family in Queensland.

The agency's owners were arrested in 2005 after an investigation by Indian authorities discovered they had bought children from traffickers for $280 each. There is no suggestion the Australian parents were aware of the circumstances of their children's adoption.

But despite the Victorian connection to the adoption agency, Ms Neville's spokesman said Victoria's Department of Human Services had not been contacted by Indian authorities about the cases.

"DHS has begun reviewing the two 1992 cases," he said. "DHS has not been approached by Indian authorities about either of these children but will co-operate with any request received."

A spokesman for Attorney-General Robert McClelland said the Federal Government was gathering information on the allegations through the Indian Government's Central Adoption Resource Authority, Indian police and the Australian Federal Police.

He stressed that Australia no longer dealt with the Chennai agency or any of the adoption agencies mentioned in the Time article.

Retired Family Court judge and children's rights campaigner John Fogarty said he would be surprised if a court ordered that adopted children must return to a country and a family they did not know after years of living in Australia.

"It is a question of balancing the feeling of outrage about a child being taken from its natural parents against the circumstance — if it is — that the child has been living extremely happily in Australia and knows no other environment or family," he said.

"It would be a difficult case for the Indian family to establish that the child's best interests require that child to return."

2008 Aug 26