More than 120,000 children have been adopted in France, coming from countries such as Korea, Peru, Vietnam, Mali, Romania or Chad. For 15 years, some of these children inquired into their origins and discovered that some illegal practices have stained their adoption. The denunciation of these irregularities through a study that the French media have reflected has opened a deep debate in France. Thousands of testimonies state that they were illegally adopted abroad, and this suggests that the failures of the system have been numerous in France.
The study, published by two historians at the beginning of January, reveals the massive and systemic nature of these irregularities that have affected most countries since 1979, and which are attributed to a multitude of causes. Thus, the report indicates that the high demand for children resulted in an increase in supply in many countries, thus favoring a mercantilist drift in adoption processes.
Individual adoptions, which until their ban in February 2022 allowed French couples to adopt on their own, are not the only ones in which there have been illicit practices. The study denounces forced consent -or without sufficient information- of biological families, fraud in the civil registry, isolated acts of profit, when not criminal or criminal networks specialized in the commercialization of children.
Some organizations are also pointed out. Specifically, it is revealed that the adoptions carried out with the accompaniment of associations authorized by the Quai d’Orsay, supposedly intended to protect the candidates from these irregularities, had part of the responsibility in this scandal. However, it is revealed that 15 organizations authorized for adoption worked with “dubious intermediaries”. It so happens that five of them still have administrative endorsement and continue to operate today.
Comexseo is one of the agencies that carried out these irregularities. In 1994, he was accused in Vietnam by the French consulate of “directly monetizing his biological parents” with some adopted children. He had to wait until 2009 for the state to remove him. In 2000, the French ambassador announced in a meeting with the Mission for International Adoption (MAI) that these practices can destroy families: “Imagine these Vietnamese children who, at 18, want to know the conditions in which they were adopted and find out that their parents bought them.”
Despite the diplomat’s alert, the country remained open to adoptions until today, becoming the main destination for French candidates, with more than 12,100 children adopted since 1979.
Historians make a similar observation with regard to Brazil, a country always open to adoptions and from which more than 6,350 French adopted children come. The registered files show consular services trying to put an end to child trafficking operated by French nationals in this country where “adoption has become a real market”, “source of enormous profits”, according to the Quai d’Orsay in 1993 “Everything is possible in the selection of children, sometimes chosen before birth or even ‘imported’ from neighboring states”, observed the French consul in 1991, before stressing that adopters are “paid by Brazilian lawyers with sums ranging up to $10,000.
The French State, in its role as regulator of international adoption, is the first affected country to debug responsibilities, while the illegal practices were known, denounced regularly even by its agents since the sixties. In recent years, complaints have been filed by people adopted from Mali, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Romania. Neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Ministry of Social Affairs or Justice would not have done anything about it.
This scandal that shakes France is the story of Marie Marre, whose testimony was collected by a journalist from Le Monde. This 56-year-old Frenchwoman of Malian origin, adopted in 1989 by a French couple, spent almost three years looking for her biological mother. Ripped from her origins by the French association Rayon de soleil de l’enfant étranger, which counts more than 320 adoptions in Mali and 7,000 in the world, she denounces illegal practices today. The magnitude is such that many other Malians maintain that they were deceived by the same French association, which acted against its will. The search for her ancestors led her to collect hundreds of documents, contacts and information that confirm that the association deceived her biological parents.
He verified that his adoption file showed information that did not match, erasures, and a letter sent to his adoptive parents: “Her mother is extremely poor and will give her daughter with relief. Kindly send me some photos from time to time “The mother will pretend to be interested in her daughter for a few more weeks, and having some photos will really dedicate her ‘consent’ to the adoption. Before long she won’t ask for anything anymore,” wrote Danielle Boudault, an agency worker. However, her biological mother, Fatouma Cissé, assures that she never signed a consent for the adoption, and that separating from her children was the result of the insistence of the French body and the promise to see them again.
In June 2020, Marie sued nine people for fraud, concealment of fraud, and breach of trust. Visas were issued to the adopted children despite Bamako having issued several alerts. Now, Marie says it’s clear France knew for years, but she “closed her eyes.” Contacted by two French journalists, the Quai d’Orsay acknowledges that there have been “illegal practices within the association, but now considers it “a reliable interlocutor, in the way it works today”. However, this association has announced that it will not study new international adoption applications due to “the sharp slowdown in procedures”.
If not all international adoptions are necessarily tainted with illicit practices, there are questions about how many of the approximately 120,000 children adopted abroad since 1972 have been victims. If the study published this February refers only to the analysis of the files available in different international institutions, a new study by the same authors, to be published in 2023, will focus on the trajectories of adopted children. The two historians will try to find out how many of them have launched investigations into their origins, and among them, how many have discovered irregularities in their files.