Lived Experience of Illegal and Illicit Adoption

Intercountry adoption is regulated by the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. This convention was designed to protect the best interests of the child in intercountry adoption and prevent the abduction, trafficking or sale of children for intercountry adoption purposes.

While it is impossible to calculate exactly how many illegal and illicit adoptions have occurred into Australia, we do know we have specific cohorts of adoptees here from various countries. Ethiopia and India were the most recent countries where our programs closed due to irregularities. Our early history in the 1980s includes trafficked adoptees from Taiwan where Julie Chu was convicted of falsifying paperwork and sentenced to prison for her role as leader of the Taiwan trafficking ring.

Globally, in February this year the Netherlands suspended its intercountry adoption program due to its historic illegal and illicit adoptions. Other European countries such as Switzerland, Sweden, and Belgium have all taken steps to carefully examine their historic adoptions.

What will Australia’s response be to our own history of illicit and illegal intercountry adoptions? Australian policy makers are currently grappling with this question and the implications. For this purpose, ISS Australia and InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV) are pleased to present our free webinar on this sensitive and complex topic with a focus on the voices of those with lived experience. We hope to help educate about the experience from lived perspective, how it impacts, and what impacted people want to see policy makers and professionals take into consideration.

This webinar took place on 10 November 2021 titled Lived Experience of Illegal and Illicit Adoption. We bring you Australian specific lived experience, however, this can be extrapolated to the global arena.

A huge thank you to our panelists: Professor David Smolin, Kimbra Butterworth-Smith, Annita Pring, Clement Lam (as read by his daughter, Marie Gardom).

• Professor David Smolin is a professor of law at Cumberland School of Lawin Birmingham, Alabama. He is also the Harwell G. Davis Chair in Constitutional Law and director for the Centre for Children, Law, and Ethics. Professor Smolin is a world leading expert on illegal and illicit intercountry adoption and has written and spoken extensively on this topic. He has also been personally impacted by illegal and illicit intercountry adoption.
• Kimbra Butterworth-Smith has experience working in humanitarian NGOs in Australia and abroad. She is also an intercountry adult adoptee from Taiwan whose adoption was facilitated illegally by Julie Chu.
• Annita Pring is an Australian adoptive mother to a Thai son.
• Clement Lam Swee Seng is a retired counsellor in marriage, youth and drug addiction ministry in Malaysia. He also is a Chinese father of loss to a daughter who was sent abroad and adopted into a British adoptive family. Clement has only recently been reunited with his daughter.

Many thanks to my co-presenters at ISS Australia, CEO Peter van Vliet and Deputy CEO Damon Martin.

Resources

Reference to the investigation other countries have done already, can be found in the resources list for this past blog: Governments Finally Recognising Illicit and Illegal Adoption Practices.

One Adoptee’s Thoughts on the UN’s Joint Statement on Illegal Intercountry Adoptions

What is an illicit or illegal adoption?