Voices for Vietnam Adoption Integrity

Posted today on the wire:
Vietnam has failed to police its adoption system, allowing corruption, fraud and baby-selling to flourish, the U.S. Embassy says in a new report obtained by The Associated Press.
The nine-page document describes brokers scouring villages for babies, hospitals selling infants whose mothers cannot pay their bills, and a grandmother giving away her [...]

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It’s my guess that everyone connected to Vietnam adoptions has seen the internal USCIS memo regarding a new DNA requirement that was posted on Bring Our Children Home yesterday. This memo was news to us as it was to most people in the adoption community - although it appears that USCIS did notify some agencies [...]

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Yesterday, Wednesday March 12th, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing titled, “THE UNITED STATES AND VIETNAM:EXAMINING THE BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP” which was presided by Senator Barbara Boxer.
The hearing did not primarily focus on inter-country adoption issues, but the topic was raised. The Department of State’s representative at the hearing, Christopher Hill, Assistant Secretary, [...]

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Suddenly it seems everyone is talking about the Hague and how it might affect the renegotiation of the US-VN Agreement. Frankly at this point I’m having a hard time keeping all the various statements and references straight. So I thought the best place to start is a simple list of recent statements… no in-depth commentary [...]

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JCICS has reported back after their presentation of their Standards of Practice to the Vietnam Ministry of Justice (MOJ), Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) and to the United States Embassy in Hanoi this week:

During numerous meetings with MOLISA and MOJ, their desire to implement the Hague Convention was reconfirmed.  Joint Council understands that [...]

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Contributed by Jena, who blogs at Two Different Loves
There has been a lot of buzz this past week about which agencies have been accredited as Hague Compliant. There have been questions about why some agencies haven’t been. The larger question to ask may be, why is compliance with Hague regulations so important to look for [...]

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JCICS has published the list of the agencies who have agreed to follow the recently drafted Standards of Practice. Thirty-six of the forty-two agencies currently licensed in Vietnam signed. According to the timeline previously posted by JCICS, the next step will come later this month when “Joint Council will present our Standards of Practice to [...]

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Adoptive parents bring Vietnamese daughter home
OCRegister - Santa Ana,CA,USA
The couple received an e-mail Thursday morning from immigration officials saying they had decided to approve the couple’s adoption despite objections from the State Department. Ecstatic, Steve Carroll got on a plane to Vietnam hours later.
Madelyn, or Maddy as her parents affectionately call her, arrived at the [...]

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In 2002 when we were living in Cambodia with our daughter waiting on the embassy to process her paperwork, I had the occasion to visit another little girl in the hospital. She was just over a year old and had contracted pneumonia in the orphanage. My friend D~, who was waiting with her son, learned [...]

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 Vietnam police bust baby trafficking gang
(excerpt)
Vietnamese police have arrested four people this week for trafficking babies, including one yet to be born, for adoption inside the country or in China, authorities here said Wednesday.
Authorities believed the gang bought Vietnamese baby girls for $500 each and boys for $1,000 and sold them for about twice [...]

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