Press release on the Foreign Ministry’s report on the violation of children’s rights in the international adoption process in the United States

The Foreign Ministry has prepared a report on the violation of children’s rights in the international adoption process in the United States.

This issue acquired a special edge after the Russian Federation had to launch the special military operation for the demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine and the protection of Donbass.

The main reason for Washington’s ostentatious concern for children in the zone of the special military operation is that the US administration regarded Ukraine as one of the main sources of the international adoption of children, predominantly children of Slavic origin.

The United States is the only country that has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which set out the basic standards of the comprehensive protection of children’s rights.

The process of international adoption in the United States is non-transparent, corrupt and not protected against neocolonial political considerations. In particular, the US administrations, whether Democratic or Republican, stubbornly refuse to sign relevant bilateral agreements with the origin countries of adopted children. At the same time, US administrations encourage the origin countries to join the 1994 Hague Adoption Convention, which suits the Americans’ purposes, and is promoting the establishment of an international adoption services market based on a neocolonial scheme: developing countries as the suppliers of children for adoption – Western countries – the host party.

Regrettably, there were numerous flagrant violations in the process of the adoption of Russian children in by US citizens (this was banned on January 1, 2013), including grave crimes such as murder, rape, bodily harm and abuse. The number of adoptions by same-sex families and transfers of parental rights was increasing.

The US Department of State routinely hushed up numerous high-profile violations of US criminal, administrative, migration and social laws during the adoption of Russian children, and it did not include that information in its annual field-specific reports.

The US authorities, acting contrary to international law and the bilateral Russian-US Consular Convention (1964), withheld forensic documents in cases of crimes against adopted children from Russia and denied consular access to underage victims of physical or sexual violence. They disregarded relevant requests from concerned Russian bodies, including the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee, and many times lowered adoption standards for American adoptive parents.

Information about all these negative elements, including numerous facts and statistics, is available in the report.

We regret to say that the United States’ efforts to pose as one of the main defenders of children’s rights on the international stage have not been supported by the relevant domestic legislation or law enforcement practice. The US system of children’s rights protection is not suited to deal with current challenges.

We are referring to systemic drawbacks that prevent an appropriate overall protection of children’s rights in the United States. Neither the adoptive parents, nor the US legal system nor American public organisations can guarantee the protection of children’s rights and interests in accordance with international standards.