The adoption of Russian children associated with bureaucracy
Marina Snakina, 7, does not know that adoptive parents are frightened, they expect to Boulder, Colo.Kenneth Schwartz and his wife Elizabeth Relin, adopted Marina’s 5 years, sister, desperate, the house of Marina, and fall for cataract surgery. But now they can not.
As hundreds of Russian orphans, have found foreign adoptive parents, Marina is a prisoner of a Byzantine bureaucracy of the new Russian law on acceptance. In the meantime, it is smooth - and experts could say that nine months - children have spent most or all of their lives in public institutions have helped to keep waiting.
“We are committed to him with emotion:” Mr. Schwartz said. “We want only to arrive. But we know we are not under control. ”
Bureaucratiques tie-ups have gradually Russia. But, in addition to the adoption sets a new standard for administrative inefficiency.
Support for foreigners, Russian children are also political and emotional an issue that the government was forced, the draft new legislation. But the open-ended foreign judgement pending adoption of the new law on the termination of the voting is almost as controversial.
“The law is in force, but it does not work,” said Viktor Parshutkin, press secretary for International Affairs Sub-Committee on Rules of Procedure. “Nothing is going forward, because it is a complete lack of coordination, departments and take precedence over federal interests and humanitarian interests as well. ”
He added, in anger: “We are talking here about a category of people without rights. Orphans can not protect. ”
It was with the declared objective of protecting orphans that the Russian government began last year to work on a new law, it would be a tightening of rules on foreign adoption in force. While foreign adoptions accounted for only 6 percent of adoptions in Russia in 1994, there was disproportionate publicity - much of lurid tabloid accounts of babies sold, and even stories of children are whisked to the abroad, as well as their internal organs are sold.
That person was expected that the new law was adopted on March 15 bureaucrats continue Gerangel on the formalities necessary to implement it. In the meantime, the government decides on such procedures to observe, as the welfare of children after their adoption, neither the old law nor the new law can be applied, adoption and abroad are frozen .
I want to dispel the problem, Education Minister Yevgeny V. Tkachenko wrote to regional administrators in June, it charged, processing adoptions under the old law, until the new was in force.
Under the previous law, disabled children by foreigners could be adopted. In June, nearly 200 children with disorders ranging from rickets to heart disease were adopted, issued visas by the U.S. embassy and take new houses in the USA.
But in July, President of the Russian Federation and the Prosecutor General Alexei N. Ilyushenko, but the Minister of Education and ordered all stops adoption.
“Mr. Tkachenko exceeded its authority”, Gennadi F. Polozov, head of the youth division of the attorney general office, as stringent. “He had no right suspend the implementation of the new law.”