SIXTEEN PEOPLE have gone on trial in Vietnam accused of fraudulently putting more than 250 babies up for foreign adoption, ratcheting up fears of international human trafficking.
The defendants are alleged to have run an illegal adoption ring that solicited the babies from single mothers and desperately poor families, then falsified documents to say the babies had been abandoned, making them eligible for adoption.
Among the accused were the head of two social welfare centres in Nam Dinh province as well as several doctors and nurses at village clinics, according to chief judge Dang Viet Hung.
They are charged with “abuse of power and authority” and could face prison terms of five to 10 years. The judge said the ring had sent 266 babies overseas for foreign adoption from 2005 to July 2008, when the scheme was discovered.
According to a report in the Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper this week, each defendant illegally earned between five and 10 million dong (€186-€379) from the ring.
Last year, the US embassy in Hanoi accused the Vietnamese authorities of failing to properly control its adoption system, and said that corruption, fraud and baby-selling were widespread.
Vietnam subsequently suspended a bilateral adoption agreement. An investigation by US authorities found that some agencies in the US had paid €6,800 in “donations” per child to orphanages, after officials had forged birth certificates and wrongly identified the infants as abandoned.
There were cases of parents being cheated into giving up their babies, while other infants had been procured from illegal centres that paid pregnant women to give up their newborns.
Concerns over Vietnamese adoption monitoring led the Irish adoption authorities not to renew a bilateral adoption agreement with Vietnam earlier this year.
:quality(70)/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/irishtimes/0995e307-598d-4748-9bc5-d64cd3855867.png)