ARTICLE - HAITI TO TIGHTEN ADOPTION RULES

HAITI TO TIGHTEN ADOPTION RULES
(Edmonton Journal) - AFP

President vows to issue decree amid parliamentary stalemate

Haitian President Michel Martelly said Thursday he would issue a presidential decree to tighten up Haiti's adoption procedures and ensure all applications go through authorized entities.

Legislation to that effect has already gone through the National Assembly and is expected to pass the Senate soon, but Martelly, who was sworn in as president in May, is struggling to form a government to sign off on the law.

Martelly's first pick as prime minister, businessman Daniel-Gerard Rouzier, was rejected by a parliament dominated by his predecessor's ruling party earlier this week.

"While waiting for a vote on this law, a delay I hope will be as short as possible, I intend to issue a presidential decree making it obligatory for adoption applications to go through authorized organisms, as the Hague Convention outlines," Martelly said. The president vowed to ratify the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which sets forth guidelines and procedures and outlaws private or individual adoptions, during his five-year term. He was speaking at a Port-au-Prince gathering of 10 adopter nations, including France, the former colonial power which took in more Haitian children than any other country in 2010.

This "eagerly awaited" measure will effectively ban individual adoption procedures, Martelly said.

Haiti was already the poorest country in the Americas even before a January 2010 earthquake destroyed much of the capital and killed an estimated 225,000 people, creating countless more orphans.

A high-profile adoption abuse case following the quake saw 10 Americans charged with kidnapping after they sought to take a busload of 33 children over the border into the Dominican Republic without the proper paperwork. The Baptist missionaries at first presented the children as quake orphans, but it quickly emerged many of the children still had living parents, infuriating many Haitians.

A total of 318 adopted Haitian children were included in a special program and flown to France last Christmas Eve. The children were all in the process of being adopted when the quake struck on Jan. 12, 2010, causing adoptions to be delayed with some records lost in the rubble.