Pros And Cons Of Intercountry Adoption

Both the UNCRC and the Hague Convention 1993 deal with intercountry adoption as an optional care for children without families. In general, both instruments do not clearly address the issue of whether a country with large numbers of children in institutions can truly refuse to employ intercountry adoption as a form of optional care for children who are unlikely to reunite with their birth families or to be placed in domestic adoption. Both instruments however, provide discretion for states to allow adoption, local or abroad. Accordingly, states can introduce various alternative care options to ensure children without families are being provided with the necessary assistance.

4.4.1 Principle of Subsidiarity

As has been discussed, the principle

Besides, UNICEF establishes hierarchy of options to safeguarding the long-term best interests of the child. First, family solutions should generally be preferred over institutional placement. Second, permanent solutions should generally be preferred over provisional one. Finally, national solutions should generally be preferred over international ones. Since intercountry adoption satisfies the first two elements, UNICEF perceives it as “subsidiary” to any probable solution that fulfils all the elements such as domestic adoption. In applying this subsidiarity principle, UNICEF works to prevent abandonment cases and to promote the family preservation whenever appropriate. This seems to reflect that UNICEF does not promote intercountry adoption as an appropriate care to a

Abandonment with regard to a child is referred to as “the offence of a parent or guardian leaving a child under the age of 16 to its fate.” However, if the child has been taken care of by someone and the parent knows and permits it, the child is not considered as abandoned. In this respect, each state might differ in providing legal interpretations of child abandonment in their legislation. Nevertheless, quite several countries, for instance, in the Europe have no legal definitions with regard to child abandonment except Poland. It was declared by the Polish Supreme Court in 2001 that child abandonment “was an act that involved leaving a child behind and ceasing to care for him or her, without ensuring that the child is taken care of by another person.” Accordingly, child abandonment comprises of an act leaving a child unaccompanied under someone’s care where there was no support or care could be provided, excluding baby hatch or hospital. Thus, a child who is abandoned at a hospital or baby hatch is not legally abandoned in Poland since such places or authorities have efforts to provide assistance, care and support for the child. It appears that some states do provide definition of abandoned child in their legislation. It seems hard to determine whether a child is adoptable or not if abandoned child is not