Allow Pending Adoptions in Nepal to Continue

The petition

Petition to the Minister and Acting Secretary of the Nepali Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare

The Nepali Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare’s current suspension of adoptions in Nepal causes serious negative consequences for both the children and the parents involved in over 440 adoptions that are currently pending in Nepal. These pending adoptions are ones in which the adoptive parents have already been matched with and in many cases have met and formed emotional bonds with their adoptive children.

No new adoptions have been processed or approved in Nepal in about six months and the Ministry has not announced a definite time by which processing of adoptions will be resumed. During this increasingly protracted period of delay, the children continue to live in orphanages, often under inadequate conditions. Developmental and health problems are common among children in orphanages and those problems have been shown to increase with each month of institutional care.

The adoptive parents, too, are harmed by this protracted delay. Many have already spent months and years in their adoption processes, have followed all the existing laws, and are now anguished to have their adoptions put on hold for an indeterminate period.

The suspension of adoptions in Nepal also further burdens the strained governmental and non-governmental social services for children in Nepal. There are tens of thousands of children already living in Nepal’s orphanages. Other children are less fortunate and live as street children, without even the basic care and protection usually provided by orphanages. While the suspension of the adoptions continues, more children are orphaned in Nepal every day due to pervasive conditions of poverty. The suspension denies these children and those already in the orphanage system the opportunity of being adopted by loving families.

The Ministry’s goal to reform adoption laws in Nepal is laudable. It is important that adoption laws in Nepal foster transparency, high standards, and full accountability in order to protect the important rights of the children, birth parents, adoptive parents, and all stakeholders. However, basic concepts of fairness and due process would be violated if the over 440 pending adoptions were now, at this late stage in the adoption process, subjected to substantially new legal requirements. Furthermore, concerns about the legitimacy of the orphan status of children in regard to any particular pending files can be fully investigated and resolved under the existing legal framework.

The timing for the Ministry to end the current suspension of adoptions must be immediate if the adoptions are to be finalized before 2008. In October and November, the Nepali festivals of Dashain and Tijar, as well as the planned national elections in Nepal, will surely slow, if not halt, normal administrative processes. Therefore, if the pending adoptions are not allowed to be processed and completed in advance of these events, even more significant delays and the consequent harms of those delays can be expected.

Given the harms engendered by this protracted delay, we, the undersigned, respectfully request that the Ministry resume the processing of the pending adoptions by no later than August 15, 2007.

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