ROMANIA: Romania has closed almost all the communist-era orphanages that shocked the world in the 1990s with harrowing TV images of half-starved children chained to beds, authorities said yesterday.
Romania, hoping to join the EU next year, has begun sweeping reforms to improve the plight of its orphans following heavy international criticism after the 1989 fall of communism which revealed 100,000 children locked up in filthy orphanages.
Large-scale institutions are a legacy of late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who banned birth control and abortion to boost the Black Sea state's population and fill its factories.
"There are only 30 childcare centres with over 100 children each, which we will modernise or close gradually with post-accession structural funds after 2007," said Rodica Paslaru, adviser at the Child Protection Authority.
Paslaru would not say when the process would be completed.
Last year, Romania banned international adoptions following EU concerns that graft could promote baby trafficking. The ban won praise from Brussels but observers say cumbersome bureaucracy in the former Soviet bloc state hobbles reforms that should ensure local care for abandoned children.
US officials have put pressure on Romania to relax the ban and allow foreign adoption of children whose adoption process was caught up in a three-year moratorium that preceded the ban.
Mental Disability Rights International said in a report that its investigators visiting facilities in Romania earlier this year and in 2005 found dozens of children "detained in adult facilities in conditions that were life-threatening".
Paslaru said more than 27,000 Romanian children lived in state institutions, and another 19,400 were in foster care. - (Reuters)