Mission & Justice

Michael McKenna; 3/10/08

The Goss government ignored a warning about an Indian adoption agency five years before it sent a young girl to an unwitting Queensland couple after she had allegedly been stolen away from her parents. The Bligh Government yesterday released a 1995 letter to Queensland’s then Department of Family Services which raised serious allegations against the agency, now suspected of involvement in child trafficking. Despite the warnings from Indian welfare authorities, which included allegations of falsifying the records of children, subsequent Queensland governments allowed two more children to be brought to the state for adoption. One of those children, now a nine-year-old girl adopted by a Queensland couple, is alleged to have been kidnapped in 2000 and sold to the adoption agency, Malaysian Social Services.

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Thomas Bell; 27/4/08

Vietnamese babies are being bought or stolen from parents to be sold for adoption in the West, according to a US Embassy investigation. In some cases hospitals sent babies to orphanages after their parents were unable to pay medical bills. In another, a grandmother sent a girl for adoption without telling the parents. The report by the US Embassy in Hanoi said: “In five provinces, we discovered unlicensed, unregulated facilities that provide free room and board to pregnant women in return for their commitment to relinquish their children upon birth.”

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