Media

Why I set up the Children’s High Level Group charity (2006)

Our aim: Reforming child welfare systems across Europe

Published in: UK Lib-Dem periodical, March 2006

By Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, MEP

A recent article in the Washington Post called Stealing babies for adoption was a stark reminder that the international adoption business continues to spread its tentacles all over the world.  Peter Goodman, the reporter, wrote: “Those who have studied the foreign adoption program in China say its exploitation by traffickers is not a surprising outcome in this country still transitioning from communism to capitalism, where anything profitable is quickly commercialized.”

China seems to be going through some of the problems that we saw in Romania in the 1990s: unregulated international adoptions driven by desperate parents willing to pay “top dollar”; the emergence of shadowy middlemen willing and able to “arrange” the paperwork and the corruption of the child protection service.  Only now is the truth starting to emerge in China about the networks involved in abducting babies and falsifying the paperwork required for foreign parents to adopt.

Fortunately, Romania was able to reform its child welfare system and part of this reform included the banning of international adoptions (they have also managed to close down their appalling child care institutions and set up a range of family-based placement alternatives).  Credit has to go to successive Romanian governments for prioritizing this reform, and standing by the adoption ban, in the face of a vitriolic and well organized pro-adoption lobby.

The Romanian experience in child welfare reform is of real relevance to China, and also the former Soviet Union countries and even those EU member states which have not yet fully reformed their child welfare system in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.  In Belgium and France, for example, there are more infants in child care institutions than in Romania.

In order to bring the light of child welfare reform to other countries I got together with British author JK Rowling and set up a new charitable foundation.  We chose the name Children’s High Level Group and registered as a charity in the UK and Romania.  Very soon after the charity was registered and a bank account opened we attended a high profile fundraising dinner and TV appeal in Romania — superbly organized by Romanian entrepreneur Ion Tiriac.  Romanians were delighted that they were finally able to share with others the lessons learned in reforming their child welfare system, and just over a million Euros was raised.  Finally the moment has come where Romania can reach out to help others, as we did for them during the 1990s.