Briton trades in ethnic cleansing victims' babies
Leonard Doyle
The Independent
A British adoption specialist who is on Interpol's list of suspected baby traffickers is exploiting loopholes in Eastern European adoption laws to send dozens of infants a year to the United States and Canada for profit.
Linked to the religious right-wing in North America, and promoted by televangelists, the unofficial adoption service is run by the Solomon Corporation, an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Isles and a US front organisation, the Adams Children's Foundation, which says it aim is "to save babies from abortion".
The organisation has powerful friends in the US and when Romania opposed the transfer of 28 Romanian babies to American families over a year ago, the country was told it would not obtain Most Favoured Nation trading status unless it relented. After an intervention by the White House, the infants were adopted on humanitarian grounds, overriding fears expressed by US diplomats in a memorandum that it was a "baby smuggling/adoption scheme".
The Briton behind the controversy is John Davies, 38, who has previous convictions for credit card and mortgage fraud in the UK.
He operates what investigators into illicit adoption schemes allege are de facto "fattening farms" for the newborn infants of peasant women. The infants are allegedly taken from their mothers shortly after birth and placed in a network of foster homes where they are transformed into chubby smiling babies who will appeal to North American couples desperate to adopt.
Couples in the US who are not prepared to wait for an official adoption, or are over 45 years and too old to qualify, are prepared to pay $20,000 for Mr Davies's service which operates completely outside the official adoption services of the countries involved.
Mr Davies runs his "child location service" from his home in Transylvannia in southern Romania and another base in Sgezed, the capital of southern Hungary.
He employs social workers as agents to scour hospitals and orphanages in Hungary, Romania, Moldovo, Ukraine, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania to find pregnant women willing to have their babies adopted abroad.
According to investigators who have tracked Mr Davies's new career, he finds young pregnant peasant women who are refugees. It is then easier to persuade the courts to give the children up for adoption abroad, especially if the mothers are from an ethnic minority and the country is in a state of crisis.
Mr Davies has concentrated his efforts on the Balkans, targeting the pregnant victims of ethnic cleansing, according to investigators.
Investigators say Mr Davies has found raped Muslim refugees from Bosnia, Kosovo and other parts of the conflict-ridden former Yugoslavia who have become pregnant and, in their culture, dishonoured.
A brochure sent to prospective parents in the US says: "We are proud to announce the development of an aggressive action campaign in southern Serbia" and describes how a "safe house" has been organised for a dozen unmarried Muslim women who were the victims of Serbian ethnic cleansing. "The women have asked {us} to find homes for their babies rather than abort" the publication said.
Mr Davies was arrested in Zagreb, Croatia, in early January and was detained for two weeks over suspected illegal adoption. He was charged with coercing women to give up their children and with "trying to change the status of families", but has since been released while the police investigation continues.
In a telephone interview at the weekend, Mr Davies said he hoped to sue the Croatian state for wrongful arrest and he flatly denied that he had done anything illegal. Claiming to have been denounced by a social worker who was trying to extort bribes from him, Mr Davies said that he was only working "in the interests of the children".
He also volunteered that his adoption and fostering activities had not made him wealthy.
"I drive a 10-year-old car with 200,000 miles on it and no matter what I do I find myself wrongfully accused," he said.
His company was registered in Croatia and he was simply trying to rescue the children of Ukranian women coerced into prostitution for the benefit of the United Nations forces and the Croatian army, he said.
Mr Davies, who was born in Hammersmith, west London, last came to the attention of the authorities when a diplomatic tug of war broke out between the US on the one hand, and Hungary and Romania on the other, over the 28 children he transported over the border to the city of Szeged.
The Hungarian authorities seized the children from foster homes where Mr Davies had placed them pending adoption to the US and the authorities began investigating whether the mothers had been paid to sell their children into adoption.
Romania, which tightened its adoption procedures after it was accused of allowing a market in babies to develop after the 1989 revolution, demanded that the children be taken back to Romania and reunited with the mothers who abandoned them, or to be placed into care.