Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Abandonment Cases

As many of you have heard, there is a lot of buzz coming out of Ethiopia about the status of abandonment cases. Due to an unusually high number of illegal abandonment cases in Addis Ababa since last fall, the Federal Courts in Addis Ababa had originally planned to put a hold on all abandonment cases.

However, upon further investigation, the hold on case approvals now applies only to five specific orphanages in Ethiopia, none of which are orphanages IAN works with. At this point, the hold on abandonment cases will not affect IAN families.

It is a good thing for the ethical standards of adoption in Ethiopia that these cases are being looked at more closely to avoid families to illegally abandoning their children. At this point we have not seen any impact on the overall status of adoption timelines, but we will continue to watch for this in the future. IAN and our in-country facilitators will continue to monitor this situation closely, and we will keep you updated with any changes.

2 comments:

Ruthanne said...

Thank you for the update. It's so good to know that our orphanages and facilitator are not involved in this.

Anonymous said...

Where did you get this info??? Yesterday we were told we lost our referral while the investigation was going on...This might change things.