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2002
INTERNATIONAL ADOPTIONS:
PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
MAY 22, 2002
Serial No. 107–90
Printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/international—relations
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COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York
JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa
DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey
DAN BURTON, Indiana
ELTON GALLEGLY, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida
CASS BALLENGER, North Carolina
DANA ROHRABACHER, California
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California
PETER T. KING, New York
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
AMO HOUGHTON, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
JOHN COOKSEY, Louisiana
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
RON PAUL, Texas
NICK SMITH, Michigan
JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania
DARRELL E. ISSA, California
ERIC CANTOR, Virginia
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JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
BRIAN D. KERNS, Indiana
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
MARK GREEN, Wisconsin
TOM LANTOS, California
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American Samoa
DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
EARL F. HILLIARD, Alabama
BRAD SHERMAN, California
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
JIM DAVIS, Florida
ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
BARBARA LEE, California
JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
JOSEPH M. HOEFFEL, Pennsylvania
EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon
SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada
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GRACE NAPOLITANO, California
ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
DIANE E. WATSON, California
THOMAS E. MOONEY, SR., Staff Director/General Counsel
ROBERT R. KING, Democratic Staff Director
GROVER JOSEPH REES, Professional Staff Member and Counsel
LIBERTY DUNN, Staff Associate
C O N T E N T S
WITNESSES
The Honorable Mary L. Landrieu, a U.S. Senator from the State of Louisiana
The Honorable James W. Ziglar, Commissioner, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
The Honorable Mary Ryan, Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, U.S. Department of State
Kimberly Edmonds-Woulfe, an Adoptive Parent
Cindy Freidmutter, Executive Director, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
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Susan Soon-keum Cox, Vice President of Public Policy and External Services, Holt International Children's Services
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
The Honorable Henry J. Hyde, a Representative in Congress from the State of Illinois, and Chairman, Committee on International Relations: Prepared statement
The Honorable Mary L. Landrieu: Prepared statement
The Honorable Benjamin A. Gilman, a Representative in Congress from the State of New York: Statement of William L. Pierce, Ph.D., Executive Director, U.S.A. Committee for International Association of Voluntary Adoption Agencies & NGOs (IAVAAN)
The Honorable Joseph R. Pitts, a Representative in Congress from the State of Pennsylvania: Prepared statement
The Honorable James W. Ziglar: Prepared statement
The Honorable Mary Ryan: Prepared statement
Kimberly Edmonds-Woulfe: Prepared statement
Cindy Freidmutter: Prepared statement
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Susan Soon-keum Cox: Prepared statement
APPENDIX
The Honorable Henry J. Hyde: Questions submitted to the Honorable James W. Ziglar and the Honorable Mary Ryan and their responses
The Honorable Darrell Issa, a Representative in Congress from the State of California: Questions submitted to the Honorable Mary Ryan and responses
The Honorable Earl Blumenauer, a Representative in Congress from the State of Oregon: Prepared Statement
Dr. Kek Galabru, President, Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights: Prepared statement
National Council For Adoption: Prepared statement
INTERNATIONAL ADOPTIONS:
PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2002
House of Representatives,
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Committee on International Relations,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:21 a.m. in Room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Henry J. Hyde (Chairman of the Committee) presiding.
Chairman HYDE. The Committee will come to order. Today's hearing is on the important subject of international adoptions. This topic has long been of great interest not only to thousands of American families and to the children for whom they provide loving homes, but also for their representatives in the Congress, who have been called upon with alarming frequency to intervene on their behalf when problems come up in foreign countries' adoption systems—which are often complex and sometimes obscure—or in the subsequent process by which the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department adjudicate visa applications on behalf of children adopted overseas.
During the last Congress, there were two important legislative developments that should go a long way toward ensuring clarity and integrity to the international adoption process and thus greatly reducing the number of heartbreaking occasions on which the process produces unpleasant surprises or breaks down altogether. One of these developments was the ratification by the United States Senate of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. The other was the enactment of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, which will allow the United States to implement its obligations under the act.
The purposes of the Hague Convention and of the Intercountry Adoption Act are twofold. Their first purpose to facilitate international adoptions whenever they are in the best interest of the child by eliminating unnecessary confusion, expense, and delay resulting from differences among the laws and practices of nations. The second and equally important purpose is to ensure transparent and fair regulation of international adoptions, so that adoptions that are not in the best interests of the child will be less likely to take place. This regulatory function applies to gross abuses such as kidnapping and baby-selling, as well as other abuses that may result in placing children in inappropriate settings.
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The State Department, which is designated by the Intercountry Adoption Act as the U.S. ''central authority'' for Hague Convention adoptions, is still in the process of drafting the regulations that are necessary in order to implement the Intercountry Adoption Act and allow the Hague Convention to come into effect in the United States. Eighteen months have passed since the act became law, and although we recognize this is a complex undertaking, Members of Congress who follow the international adoption issue are hopeful that the regulations will be issued soon.
Meanwhile, we continue to learn from our constituents about the serious difficulties they are encountering in the international adoption process. Indeed, we must recognize that implementation of the Hague Convention will not totally eliminate these difficulties, in part because some of the foreign countries whose systems are the most problematic are unlikely to ratify the Convention anytime soon.
For about 8 months now I have been following closely the cases of a number of U.S. citizens who have been attempting to adopt in one such troubled country. I was first made aware of the circumstances in Cambodia last October because two of the families caught up in this tragic situation were constituents of mine. One of the adoptive parents involved was Kimberly Edmonds-Woulfe, who is one of our witnesses today. Because State Department consular officers in Cambodia believed they had identified serious problems with several local adoption agencies, Mrs. Edmonds-Woulfe and other adoptive parents were forced to wait in Cambodia with their new babies for weeks on end—in some cases for months—incurring thousands of dollars in personal expenses and having to contemplate the possibility that their children would never be allowed to live with them.
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The investigation of the Cambodian adoption agencies, which I understand is still ongoing, involves serious charges, ranging from corruption to the allegation that some of the babies might have been stolen. To my knowledge, however, no one ever claimed that the adoptive parents were anything but innocent victims.
In an effort to resolve the situation, I spoke personally with our U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, Kent Wiedemann, and with the INS Commissioner, James Ziglar, who will also be one of our witnesses today. I urged them to arrive quickly at a solution that would penalize the criminals, if any, but not the babies and their adoptive parents.
I was very pleased by the decision of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in November to use its ''parole'' power to allow these children to live with their adoptive parents here in the United States pending further proceedings. At the same time, however, the INS and the State Department decided to suspend all further visa processing for adopted children in Cambodia. This suspension affected hundreds of families whose cases were in various stages of the adoption process, including some in which the Cambodian adoption decree was already final and others in which there was already a particular child waiting to be adopted by a family here in the United States. Although the INS and State ultimately announced a plan by which most of these applications are now being considered on a case-by-case basis, many of the children are still languishing in Cambodian orphanages.
I want to compliment Commissioner Ziglar for his prompt attention to this problem when we brought it to his attention. I strongly support the INS and the State Department in their determination not to facilitate baby trafficking and similar abuses. But I also believe there is nothing to be gained by forcing innocent babies to spend the rest their childhood in orphanages instead of with loving parents in the United States.
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What we need, therefore, is a new set of procedures that will spot these abuses early so that U.S. citizens who wish to adopt can be warned away from the countries or agencies involved before they begin the adoption process. Our procedures must also be reformed so that allegations can be quickly investigated and resolved. I understand that the INS and State are working on the development of just such a set of procedures, and I hope we will hear something today about the progress of this very important endeavor.
I look forward to the testimony of all our witnesses on how we can reform the international adoption system, both to minimize the pain and the anger the process can generate when it goes wrong and to maximize the happiness that comes when a child who might otherwise live out his or her whole childhood in an orphanage is placed with a loving family.
I am now pleased to yield to the distinguished Ranking Member, Mr. Lantos, for any statement he may wish to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hyde follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE HENRY J. HYDE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, AND CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Today's hearing is on the important subject of international adoptions. This topic has long been of great interest not only to thousands of American families and to the children for whom they provide loving homes, but also for their representatives in Congress, who have been called upon with alarming frequency to intervene on their behalf when problems come up in foreign countries' adoption systems—which are often complex and sometimes obscure—or in the subsequent process by which the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department adjudicate visa applications on behalf of children adopted overseas.
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During the last Congress, there were two important legislative developments that should go a long way toward ensuring clarity and integrity to the international adoption process, and thus greatly reducing the number of heartbreaking occasions in which the process produces unpleasant surprises or breaks down altogether. One of these developments was the ratification by the United States Senate of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. The other was the enactment of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, which will allow the United States to implement its obligations under the Act.
The purposes of the Hague Convention and of the Intercountry Adoption Act are twofold. Their first purpose is to facilitate international adoptions whenever they are in the best interest of the child, by eliminating unnecessary confusion, expense, and delay resulting from differences among the laws and practices of nations. The second and equally important purpose is to ensure transparent and fair regulation of international adoptions, so that adoptions that are not in the best interests of the child will be less likely to take place. This regulatory function applies to gross abuses such as kidnapping and baby-selling, as well as to other abuses that may result in placing children in inappropriate settings.
The State Department, which is designated by the Intercountry Adoption Act as the U.S. ''central authority'' for Hague Convention adoptions, is still in the process of drafting the regulations that are necessary in order to implement the Intercountry Adoption Act and allow the Hague Convention to come into effect in the United States. Eighteen months have passed since the Act became law, and although we recognize that this is a complex undertaking, Members of Congress who follow the international adoption issue are hopeful that the regulations will be issued soon.
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Meanwhile, we continue to learn from our constituents about the serious difficulties they are encountering in the international adoption process. Indeed, we must recognize that implementation of the Hague Convention will not totally eliminate these difficulties, in part because some of the foreign countries whose systems are the most problematic are unlikely to ratify the Convention anytime soon.
For about eight months now, I have been following closely the cases of a number of U.S. citizens who have been attempting to adopt in one such troubled country. I was first made aware of the circumstances in Cambodia last October because two of the families caught up in this tragic situation were constituents of mine. One of the adoptive parents involved was Kimberly Edmonds-Woulfe, who is one of our witnesses today. Because State Department consular officers in Cambodia believed they had identified serious problems with several local adoption agencies, Mrs. Edmonds-Woulfe and other adoptive parents were forced to wait in Cambodia with their new babies for weeks on end—in some cases for months—incurring thousands of dollars in personal expenses and having to contemplate the possibility that their children would never be allowed to live with them.
The investigation of the Cambodian adoption agencies, which I understand is still ongoing, involves serious charges, ranging from corruption to the allegation that some of the babies might have been stolen. To my knowledge, however, no one ever claimed that the adoptive parents were anything but innocent victims.
In an effort to resolve the situation, I spoke personally with our U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, Kent Wiedemann, and with the INS Commissioner, James Ziglar, who will also be one of our witnesses today. I urged them to arrive quickly at a solution that would penalize the criminals, if any, but not the babies and their adoptive parents.
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I was pleased by the decision of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in November to use its ''parole'' power to allow these children to live with their adopted parents here in the United States pending further proceedings. At the same time, however, the INS and the State Department decided to suspend all further visa processing for adopted children in Cambodia. This suspension affected hundreds of families whose cases were in various stages of the adoption process, including some in which the Cambodian adoption decree was already final and others in which there was already a particular child waiting to be adopted by a family here in the United States. Although the INS and State ultimately announced a plan by which most of these applications are now being considered on a case-by-case basis, many of the children are still languishing in Cambodian orphanages.
I strongly support the INS and the State Department in their determination not to facilitate baby trafficking and similar abuses. But I also believe there is nothing to be gained by forcing innocent babies to spend the rest of their childhood in orphanages instead of with loving parents in the United States.
What we need, therefore, is a new set of procedures that will spot these abuses early, so that U.S. citizens who wish to adopt can be warned away from the countries or agencies involved before they begin the adoption process. Our procedures must also be reformed so that allegations can be quickly investigated and resolved. I understand that the INS and State are working on the development of just such a set of procedures, and I hope we will hear something today about the progress of this important endeavour.
I look forward to the testimony of all our witnesses on how we can reform the international adoption system, both to minimize the pain and anger the process can generate when it goes wrong and to maximize the happiness that comes when a child who might otherwise live out his or her whole childhood in an orphanage is placed with a loving family.
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I am now pleased to yield to the distinguished Ranking Member, Mr. Lantos, for any statement he might wish to make.
Mr. LANTOS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me say publicly that yesterday you led the way in the House of Representatives in our adoption of a major and well-designed assistance program for Afghanistan, and here you are this morning dealing with one of the most heart wrenching issues that we on this Committee will be seized with, and I want to associate myself with your opening remarks, which are filled with the compassion and decency that you exemplify.
Mr. Chairman, over the last decade thousands of foreign children have been brought to the United States to find loving homes with our fellow citizens, often saved from miserable conditions in poorly funded institutions. In 1990, about 7,000 foreign children were adopted from abroad by U.S. citizens. By last year over 19,000 such children were adopted by Americans. All of us know friends who have adopted internationally, including our esteemed colleague from Massachusetts, who adopted a child from Vietnam during Operation Baby Lift and who has grown up to be a wonderful young person of whom we are deeply proud.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Thanks very much.
Mr. LANTOS. Reaching across enormous distances to provide homes for these children represents the very best of the American spirit, and I commend all those who have opened their hearts and their lives and their homes to these needy orphans.
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But along with the increase in heart warming stories of successful adoptions, we have learned that problems do exist with international adoption, including exorbitant fees, false medical information about the prospective adopted child and in some limited cases trafficking of children. In order to address these problems, our Committee passed an act, the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, during the last session of Congress which cleared the way for U.S. ratification of a multilateral treaty to try to end these abuses, the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption.
I deeply regret, Mr. Chairman, that it is over 18 months since we adopted this legislation and the Department of State has yet to issue the implementing rules for this act. I have also been disturbed by reports that a draft of these rules, including so much input from parents, adoption agencies and others involved in international adoption, is now being completely rewritten. I truly hope this is not the case because it would be a setback for the inclusive consultive process that has taken about a year and a half.
In the meantime, Mr. Chairman, we have learned that our work toward an international standard may not be a complete solution. Many countries, including the country we will hear about today, Cambodia, have professed an unwillingness to join the Hague Convention. There remain many problems that we need to address directly with our friends there on a bilateral basis. I am particularly concerned about how we deal with American parents who are trying to adopt needy children from these countries.
I think, Mr. Chairman, it is unconscionable that U.S. citizens travel to foreign countries, adopt children under local law, and only afterward are told that their child cannot return home with them because of concerns that the adoption may be fraudulent.
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Madam Assistant Secretary, Ms. Commissioner, this needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed fast. This patient Committee will be singularly impatient unless we get a very quick resolution to this issue. If there are problems with adoptions in a country, we need to identify them before U.S. parents travel abroad to adopt. The effort to adopt is difficult enough without putting the foreign children, the American parents, and our government in an impossible situation. I look forward to hearing what progress you are making in this regard.
Mr. Chairman, I look forward to hearing what the Administration is doing about these issues and how those who are most closely affected by this process will address the problems that they see.
Thank you very much.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you, Mr. Lantos. Before we entertain opening statements from the other Members, we have a visitor from the other body, as we lovingly refer to the upper Chamber, Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. The Senator would like to make a statement and we welcome her.
Senator LANDRIEU. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is indeed a pleasure to be with you.
Chairman HYDE. Would you push the button on your microphone?
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE MARY L. LANDRIEU, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF LOUISIANA
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Senator LANDRIEU. Here we go. There we go. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. See, I have already learned something being over here before this august Committee. Let me begin, Mr. Chairman, by truly thanking you and the Ranking Member of this Committee for your leadership. Truly, without your leadership, working in such a cooperative fashion and giving a nod to all of the positive bills and treaties that have come before this Committee, we would not be making the kind of progress we are making in this area, not only in the United States but around the world. So truly a tremendous amount of credit goes to you and your Ranking Member as well as the distinguished Members of this Committee.
There are over 16 Members of this Committee, including Congressman Delahunt, who are also members of the Coalition on Adoption and who work very hard on adoption both on the domestic side and the international side. They give a tremendous amount of their time and their staff time to this important issue. So I want to begin by acknowledging them and thanking them for their work.
Secondly, I also want to say that it is so important for America to be a leader in the world in the area of adoption. Don't ever let us forget that there are not many countries, many parliaments, many individuals, many communities around the world that look to America for leadership in many areas, and adoption is one of them. Why? Because Americans adopt more children combined than any other Nation on Earth. We adopt more children domestically in our own communities, we adopt more children from abroad, more than all the other nations combined.
I think that is a wonderful thing about America, and I have more on this in my written testimony, but I want to just spend a minute of my 5 minutes on this point.
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Mr. Chairman, ever since September 11, I think and hope that we have become as a country more convinced that the more we reach out and try to understand and build bridges between our countries, the more hope there is for this world. As an advocate of adoption and as an adoptive mother myself, having worked in domestic and international adoption, I have to tell you how impressed I am with the point that the 20,000 children adopted internationally are goodwill ambassadors from the many countries of the world. These children come from all over the world to be a part of families in the United States and help build peace in a way that I am not sure any school, church, or faith-based organization can, about the issues of humanity. They teach us that people can love each other across racial lines, despite physical and emotional barriers, and that the miracle of adoption is truly that, a miracle.
We have learned in America, not all countries know this yet, that governments do a good job in many things. One of them is not raising children. The children need to be raised in families with at least one responsible caring adult that can help that child to be everything God intended when He created that child. Adoption to me is an extension of that miracle. Adoption is a part of building families which is important and essential in American society.
That is why this issue is so important. It affects millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people have been adopted or adopted children over the years. It is a large constituency. It is all about the founding principles of America, about families raising children not governments, not institutions, not orphanages. It is about really putting faith in the thought that every child deserves a home and the belief that there is no child that is unwanted.
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I really want to emphasize this last point. We believe in the Coalition of Adoption that no child is unwanted, we just have unfound families. Our goal as a government and community, large and small, is to try to match the millions and millions of children in this world who are in desperate need for parents, with families who can love them.
I am hard pressed to think how you provide opportunity for anyone if the first thing you don't try to do is provide a child with a family. I know good education is important, I know good health is important, but an opportunity to be all that they can be in my mind starts with at least pairing them with a nurturing loving adult that will say ''I will commit.''
Mr. Chairman, you know this and I am preaching to the choir to say this to you, but that's why I feel so strongly about this issue.
My final point is that we have to continue to do what we can to pass treaties and laws to reduce the barriers to adoption in our own country and abroad. We have to fix a broken foster care system that might have started with good intentions but has resulted in locking up children in ongoing long-term foster care, sort of delaying their opportunities for adoption both in our own country and abroad. More specifically, that is why we must do something in both the long- and short-term in Cambodia. I have said, with all due respect to Commissioner Ziglar, whom I have worked with for many years and have the highest respect as a person and as an administrator, that if there was a bank robbery in Duluth, Minnesota tomorrow, we would not close down the banking system, we would find the bank robber. We would prosecute the bank robber, we would put them in jail and then we would work vigorously, as you said in your opening statement, to use the system to clamp down on future fraud and abuse. Closing down or setting moratoria in countries only sets back the positive aspects of adoption that I have just described by light-years. People get afraid, parents get afraid. People who want to adopt say I could never put myself through that situation.
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So you are right, Mr. Chairman, we have to truly fix this and find a better remedy than a complete and total suspension. I commit to work with you and the Members of the Senate and House Committees to try to lift the suspension, which I believe was an inappropriate remedy. Not an illegal remedy because the law was there to do it, but an inappropriate remedy. Let us work together to find better remedies in the future so that we can promote adoption, not suppress it, and help to truly make the family dream of the family true for all the millions of children in our country and around the world. We need a system that supports adoptive families, many of whom already have biological children and are simply making a place in their home and their hearts for a child in desperate need.
I know that I am telling you, Mr. Chairman, everything you already know, but I so appreciate your giving your time to this hearing, and I look forward to working with you on implementing the Hague and in coming up with better remedies to how to address these issues in the future. I hope we are successful in getting these particular children from Cambodia into the arms of their wonderful families as soon as possible. I commit to you my support and the support of Members from both sides of the aisle for the good work you are doing over here.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Senator Landrieu follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE MARY L. LANDRIEU, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF LOUISIANA
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I often tell my staff that if I had my druthers, I would work on the issue of adoption 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As the Senate Democratic Co-Chair of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption and the mother of two beautiful children who were adopted, there is not a day that goes by that I am not reminded of the true miracle of adoption. I would like to commend you and members of this committee for having this hearing. It is a real privilege and honor to be here this morning and share my thoughts with you on this important issue.
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Mr. Chairman, as you well know, 19,237 children were adopted by American citizens last year. 18,477 children the year before that, 16,363 in 1999 and 15,744 children in 1998. That is almost 100,000 children in four years. I think it is easy for us to understand the impact that these adoptions had on the adoptive families and the orphan children, but what I would like to focus on this morning is the impact that this has for the diplomatic relations between the United States and countries throughout the world. In sheer numbers alone, this is evident. 100,000 children, typically adopted by two parents. In real terms, these children are ''mini-ambassadors'' to 200,000 American citizen parents, 400,000 grandparents, conservatively 800,000 aunts and uncles, 300,000 siblings. Because of this magnificent process, communities all over the U.S. are deepening this understanding and affinity for the people of the world. September 11th reminded us of the importance of continuing to build bridges with the nation's of the world. International adoption is one very effective and lasting way to build these bridges.
Over this past year, I have had the privilege of meeting with the Presidents of China, Kazakstan, Romania and high ranking government official from each of the largest sending countries. Each time the message is the same. They want to do what they can to make the Hague more than just apiece of paper with 59 signatures on it. They are looking to the US to lead the way toward a system of international adoption and child welfare that is based on best practices. A system comprised of meaningful protections for the adoptive parents, the birth parents, and perhaps most importantly the children; a system that universally recognizes that a government institution is not and cannot be an adequate replacement for a family and works toward the shared mission of finding every child in this world a loving and nurturing, permanent family.
One and five American women of child bearing age are unable to conceive a child. Furthermore, adoption has become more socially acceptable. It is for these reasons that the number of international adoptions have quadrupled, and they will continue to do so. We need to revisit the way we handle international adoption at the federal level. The recent crisis in Cambodia highlights for us the need for this change. It is my hope that we can work together with the administration to redesign the way things are done now. To remove adoption from the ''immigration procedure'', to strengthen our proactive diplomatic relations with sending countries. As the largest beneficiary of the international adoption system, we have an obligation to do this.
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Before closing, I would like to make some comments on the record about the current suspension in Cambodia. I have three concerns that I hope will be addressed in this hearing this morning. First, it is important to note that this suspension is unprecedented. Never before has the INS taken such action in response to allegations of baby trafficking. The lack of a process or guidelines governing the issuing of suspensions was evident in how things have been handled over the last few months. INS has done their best to address the problems in Cambodia in a fair and consistent manner, and I appreciate that, but it was clear to me, the adoptive parents, the government of Cambodia and the public at large that we were making up the laws and procedures as we went along. What's more, it is still not clear that the evidence was compelling or specific enough to warrant a complete suspension. This should not be. Suspending adoptions is a serious action, and should only be taken when all other remedies have been exhausted. In this case, it was the first official action, not the last. Carrying out a suspension requires forethought and planning so as to minimize the impact of innocent parents and the orphan children. None of that was done here.
Second, I am gravely concerned by the actions of the Department of State in this matter. From September until December of 2001, consular officials were exercising discretion they did not have the authority to exercise. What's more, they were often unprofessional, unresponsive and often rude when dealing the American citizens they are charged to serve. These actions not only go against the guidelines issued to them by the State Department, but are also contrary to the very mission of the Embassy itself. I hope that, if nothing more, we will take a hard look at these actions and do what is necessary to ensure that US citizens are never treated like this again.
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Finally, I would like the committee to explore whether or not it was appropriate to issue this suspension in the first place. We have been told repeatedly that there is overwhelming evidence of child trafficking and yet none has been produced. If a bank was robbed in Duluth Minnesota tomorrow, we would not close down the international banking system. We should not react that way here either. Baby trafficking is wrong. It should be prosecuted. But the orphans of the world should not be held hostage by a suspension unless it is absolutely the only thing to do. I am not convinced that is the case here.
Thank you again.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you very much, Senator, for your very inspirational remarks. We appreciate them. If you have a written statement, it will be made a part of the record without objection.
Ms. LANDRIEU. Thank you.
Mr. LANTOS. May I just add a word, Mr. Chairman? Senator Landrieu, let me say I couldn't think of a more effective and more affectionate advocate, and the other body is indeed lucky to have you.
Ms. LANDRIEU. Thank you very much.
Chairman HYDE. Now we will entertain opening statements. I would admonish the Members that it is not mandatory, but we certainly welcome any opening statements you have and ask that you restrict them to 5 minutes and, without objection, any written statements you have will be made a part of the record.
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And now Mr. Gilman.
Mr. GILMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I will abide by your admonishment. I want to thank our distinguished Chairman for holding this important hearing today.
Few issues unite people of all cultures more than their belief in the future of children. However, there remain thousands of children throughout the world who day after day are longing for things that so many of us take for granted, and that is a loving family and a place to call home. All children deserve permanent loving homes.
Last year there were over 19,000 intercountry applications for adoption. That is a considerable number. However, there continue to be concerns about the system that adoptive parents must proceed through in order to adopt a child from another nation. We must make this adoption system more responsive to the needs of the families and the children and the governments involved. We must be more involved in helping foreign children in need and in preventing abuses such as child kidnapping and improper financial inducements for the relinquishment of parental rights. We should also better coordinate the international intergovernmental approval process of intercountry adoptions. We ought to have a rating system which are reputable adoption agencies.
Hopefully, today's hearing will shed some light on these and other issues and on possible strategies for dealing with future problems associated with international adoptions.
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Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that this statement of Bill Pierce of the U.S.A. Committee for International Association of Voluntary Adoption Agencies and NGOs be inserted into the record at this hearing.
Chairman HYDE. Without objection, so ordered, and the Committee has received statements from other persons and organizations that wished to be recorded and we will, without objection, have them made a part of the record as well.
[The information referred to follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF WILLIAM L. PIERCE, PH.D., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, U.S.A. COMMITTEE FOR INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF VOLUNTARY ADOPTION AGENCIES & NGOS (IAVAAN)
BACKGROUND OF THE ORGANIZATION
The U.S.A. Committee is the U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Voluntary Adoption Agencies & NGOs (IAVAAN), a nongovernmental organization with observer status at the Hague Conference on Private International Law. IAVAAN was represented at The Hague during the drafting sessions in 1991, 1992 and 1993 on the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, as well as the working sessions held on that same Convention in 1994 and 2000.
Beginning in 1990 and through 1993, I had the honor to be part of the Delegation of the U.S. Department of State which participated in the drafting and diplomatic sessions at The Hague. At that time, I served as the President and CEO of the National Council For Adoption (NCFA), a private 501 (c) 3 charity with its offices in Washington, D.C. Simultaneously, I served IAVAAN.
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In 2000, after 20 years with NCFA, I stepped down, serving as a Consultant to NCFA until mid-2001. I continued my work with IAVAAN and helped create the U.S.A. Committee for IAVAAN at its founding meeting in March, 2001.
Additional information about the U.S.A. Committee for IAVAAN is available by visiting our web site, www.iavaan.org or by calling us at 202–299–0052.
QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE HEARING ON THE COMMITTEE'S NEWS ADVISORY
1. How widespread are abuses such as child kidnapping and baby selling for the purpose of international adoption?
In recent weeks, allegations have been raised about child kidnapping and baby selling in Cambodia. Investigations are still under way and individual children are being cleared by U.S. officials so that they may travel to their new families in the U.S. My experience, which goes back to 1970, when I was the Director of the Washington Office of the Child Welfare League of America, and which continues to this day, is that such abuses are very rare. Certainly, there have been irregularities in various countries, and significant improvements have been put in place to guard against recurrence of problems. In a handful of countries, where political transitions have been characterized by continued changes in staffing of adoption offices, or by one ''improvement plan'' after another being suggested by well-meaning organizations working internationally, or by difficulties in implementing transparent economic systems, there have been continuing challenges. But those challenges cannot be accurately described as ''baby-selling.'' Rather, one should term irregular arrangements as part of a pattern of corruption which impacts every level of activity in a handful of countries, whether the activity is governmental or private. Allegations of widespread abuses such as child kidnapping and baby selling for the purpose of international adoption cannot be proved because they just do not exist, except in the fertile imaginations of some journalists seeking sensational stories, the misinterpreted understandings of some international observers who are not as familiar as they should be with international child welfare generally or international adoption specifically, or advocacy groups, whether in the U.S. or other countries, which have an antagonistic view toward all intercountry adoptions.
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2. Is there a system for tracking alleged abuses in a country?
Based on several of the countries I have visited, and the consular officials I have talked with in person or otherwise communicated with, my view is that there is an informal system for tracking alleged abuses. The system varies from country to country and from consular official to consular official. Some consular officials are more keyed into potential abuses and can ''flag'' fraudulent behavior better than others. But there is a general awareness within our overseas posts that one is to have an eye out for abuses. In some instances, in all candor, such vigilance has not always been met with approval because early warnings of suspicious activities has led to complaints about overzealous consular officers. I can think of one country in particular where warnings were given years in advance of an actual incident which causes substantial harm to children who were to be adopted by U.S. families. And, of course, a good number of U.S. families were distraught when the problems came to the fore and drew official attention in the country they had hoped to adopt children from. In a word, the system could be better if those consular officials with experience and interest in an improved approach to detecting and preventing problems were allowed to create specialized training programs for inexperienced or less experienced consular officers.
3. Are there procedures to warn potential American parents about newly imposed restrictions prior to beginning the process of locating a child?
The web site of the U.S. Department of State has an excellent country-by-country listing that prospective adoptive parents can visit. In addition, State issues updates on specific countries where high profile difficulties are being experienced. But the scenario of international adoption does not lend itself to warning American parents prior to those American parents beginning the process of locating a child. In most instances, American parents begin the process by exploring intercountry adoption generally. They read books, talk to friends, surf the web, do their homework. Often, they attend seminars and meetings to decide which country or countries they may target for their explorations. And once the parents make a decision, what follows is a period of compiling a rather impressive dossier of documentation, going through a ''home study,'' and eventually being ''matched'' with a child or, in the case of some countries, making a trip to see children in orphanages who are in need of families. The entire process may easily take a year. It simply would not be practical for the Department of State to be able to anticipate, a year in advance, newly imposed restrictions which would impact families seeking to adopt from a certain country. The People's Republic of China made certain changes to its policy regarding single individuals being able to adopt. Those changes could not have been anticipated a year in advance. The Russian Federation recently implemented a law which requires families to make two trips instead of one, a burden that not only causes psychological and other stresses but which, by our estimate, adds $20 million per year to the fees and costs of Americans adopting from Russia. Those new restrictions could have been, and hopefully will be eased once certain changes are made in Russian adoption law that are consistent with Russia's long-standing and positive view about intercountry adoptions. Such changes would be in line with Russia's stated position of implementing the Hague Convention of Intercountry Adoption. But the sort of allegations that have been raised about adoption practices in certain parts of Cambodia could not, in my opinion, have been anticipated a year in advance. The fact is that the responsibility for tracking alleged abuses and warning potential American parents should be placed more directly on the agencies and others who hold themselves out, and collect fees from families, because they say they can assist in adopting from a certain country. I do not believe that many of the dozens of families caught in the situation in Cambodia came to the decision to adopt from that country without having received at least some sort of assurances of some sort from groups or individuals to whom they paid money for what they perceived was expert advice and counsel.
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4. How does a parent locate a reputable international adoption service?
After more than 32 years in the field of child welfare, I must confess that this is a difficult task. I wish it were as simple as checking out one of the consumers' magazines and looking up ratings, but it isn't. While there are a good many reputable international adoption providers, sadly even past performance is no guarantee of future competence. There was a time in everyone's memory when Montgomery Wards and K-Mart were viewed as very successful retailing enterprises. Today, Montgomery Wards is gone and last I knew K-Mart was in reorganization. Waves of bankruptcies and mergers in the commercial world are not precisely mirrored in the world of intercountry adoption services, but there are parallels. At present, to the best of my knowledge, there is no reliable way for a parent to locate a reputable international adoption service. While many of us have agencies we might recommend informally to a friend or relative, most of us would hesitate to publish, at least at present and with the current state of the art as applied to objective measures, a list of the ''25 best intercountry adoption services'' in America. There are at least three private organizations involved in providing information so that people can make up their own mind—one long-standing printed reference and two web sites. There is at least one well-known accrediting body that presently accredits agencies for intercountry adoption service. And, once the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption is fully implemented, there should be helpful information available from the U.S. Department of State. But at present, picking an agency is risky. One cannot, for instance, simply judge by a well-organized and well-presented web site: such marketing sizzle sometimes substitutes for real professionalism. Some international adoption agencies have quite outstanding programs in one country and less promising programs in other countries. And there is substantial variation between countries.
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5. Can INS and the State Department do a better job of warning Americans about potential problems with U.S. immigration procedures required to adopt a child overseas?
In all candor, this question must be divided so that one can respond in respect to INS and the State Department separately. Well before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, INS was overwhelmed. For years, and the last five years at least, whether I was wearing my NCFA ''hat'' or my U.S.A. Committee for IAVAAN ''hat,'' I have found INS to frankly be incapable of responding to most questions in a timely fashion. Even staff members of Senators and Representatives I have talked with have expressed a similar frustration. INS has simply had too much to do, had too many changed ''signals'' from Congress and has had too much internal disorganization to be able to do its job competently. The headlines of recent weeks in respect to individuals involved in the Sept. 11 attacks came as no surprise to most of us who had dealings with INS. Indeed, there was a clear signal from the U.S. Senate about which U.S. agency is the most competent to deal with intercountry adoption matters. That signal came from the then-Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Sen. Jesse Helms, who insisted, when he introduced legislation to ratify and implement the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, that the Department of Health and Human Services be entirely excluded from the process and that INS be given the most junior role imaginable. The task of serving as ''Central Authority'' went to the U.S. Department of State. INS, in my opinion, should indeed be the subject of dramatic reorganization by the Congress, and that reorganization should be quite different than the proposal suggested by Senators Landrieu and Nickles, about which more later. My view is that the placement of the Central Authority in the U.S. Department of State offers the Congress a unique opportunity to transfer from INS to State each and every task now performed by INS that pertains to intercountry adoptions, whether under the Immigration and Nationality Act or under the implementing legislation for the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. At least five functions of INS would be transferred, making implementation of the Hague Convention more administratively simple. Those would include activities related to the I600–A, the issuing of visas for IR–4 and IR–5s, issuing of non-objection letters that a child may be issued a visa and may be admitted to and received in the U.S., shifting permanently certain enforcement powers now exercised by consular officers and receiving and reviewing the home studies.
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With INS' functions transferred to the State Department, communications difficulties which have sometimes resulted in INS acting without consulting with or informing State would be avoided. The consular officers would be able to do a better job of warning Americans about potential problems with U.S. immigration procedures because they would be in charge of those immigration procedures. Of course, it goes without saying that the budget and slots in INS, which are already inadequate to do the tasks related to intercountry adoption, should be transferred and augmented, lest the State Department become as unresponsive and disorganized bog as INS presently is.
A major challenge will be dealing with so-called ''pipeline'' cases, those situations where U.S. families have received approval to adopt in a certain country, and even have completed certain steps toward a formal adoption. At present, with INS retaining certain duties, it will be necessary for a very complicated collaboration to be mounted between INS and the State Department so that a new case-tracking system can be put in place, a system that requires communications and clearances between two agencies. A tracking system within one agency would be far simpler and less expensive to put in place. I still shudder at the memory of sitting in a conference room at the State Department some years ago, when the current implementing law was not yet introduced, hearing two of those at the table, one from INS and one from State, calmly discussing how much time and money would be required to put a complex tracking system into place. Many of us in the room came away with the clear impression that the first millions appropriated for the new Convention would be eaten up by years of INS-State bureaucratic wrangling.
LANDRIEU-NICKLES PROPOSAL
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Finally, I wish to return to the proposal from Senators Landrieu and Nickles. At a press conference a while back, I heard the reference to a proposal when the Cambodia moratorium and its impact on children and families was being discussed. I question whether this is the proper solution to the questions raised by the Cambodian moratorium.
The moratorium was, in my view, the proper step to take, given the opinion of both U.S. and Cambodian officials on the ground that there were serious questions about child kidnapping and baby selling. In such an instance, I know of no other step that should be taken other than to immediately stop the movement of children outside of a country where such allegations have been raised. To do otherwise is to risk having children who are not legally free to be adopted transferred to another country, and then having those children removed from their families and returned to their countries of origin. As heart-breaking as it was and is for those children not to be able to go to the families who were waiting to receive them in America, it would have been worse for both the children and the parents if they had had to be torn away because of improprieties in the adoption process. The U.S. is a nation of laws and no law could possibly be more sacred than observing laws preventing child kidnapping or child selling. The humanitarian and foreign policy implications of any other approach are beyond discussion.
While the children in the ''pipeline'' were waiting, there were serious concerns about their health and welfare. That point was made vividly at the Landrieu-Nickles press conference. But there is another option other than circumventing proper procedures in order to provide children with care in the U.S. The other option, which I learned from officials in the Cambodian Embassy here in Washington, was to provide, through appropriate and transparent channels, either using governmental vehicles or nongovernmental organizations, humanitarian assistance, food, shelter, and medical care to children while they waited for the investigations to be completed. The officials in the Cambodian Embassy told me the cost would be $100 per month per child. I cannot imagine a U.S. family—or U.S. adoption provider, for that matter—that would resist spending $100 per month per child on average to assure decent care for the children caught in the moratorium. And if the financial stress were too great, certainly the budget of USAID could handle $100 per month for many more children than were held up in Cambodia. What was and may still be required was the will to arrive at an alternative plan—something that protected the children while also recognizing that there were allegations that needed to be investigated.
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As a practical matter, I believe that the result of enacting the Landrieu-Nickles proposal would be not just to require advance notice but to effectively bar INS and the State Department from ever being able to make a judgment, based on their knowledge, experience and the data at hand, that adoptions should be suspended or a moratorium put in place. I cannot imagine how many clearances and how much process would be required to implement the sort of requirements that would be put in place by Landrieu-Nickles, well-meaning as it most assuredly is.
On matters of foreign policy, each Administration defers in important ways to the Congress. On matters of implementing something like intercountry adoption policy, there should be deferral to the Administration.
A FINAL COMMENT ON THE CAMBODIAN DEBACLE
I realize that the Landrieu-Nickles proposal responds to the sense, expressed in the News Advisory for this Hearing, that ''The moratorium created havoc for hundreds of American families in the process of adopting Cambodian children and brought to the fore issues about the responsibilities of the INS and the Department of State.'' I believe that questions need to be asked of the agencies who held themselves out publicly as being prepared to assist Americans in adopting from Cambodia. The Report on Intercountry Adoption 1999, published by International Concerns for Children, listed seven agencies, with fees roughly averaging $11,000, not including travel. By the time the 2001 edition of the Report was issued, notwithstanding a note to ''Expect delays in processing that are already occurring because of investigation of serious irregularities,'' 32 agencies were listed with the highest posted fee being $19,750, not including travel. In all this controversy, there needs to be greater concern expressed about the role of the agencies who ask for and receive substantial fees from American families, a concern which begins to be addressed by the question asked in the News Advisory: ''How does a parent locate a reputable adoption service?''
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We are extremely grateful to Chairman Hyde and his Committee for holding this important hearing and respectfully request that this Statement be placed in the Hearing Record.
We stand ready at any time to respond to any questions about this or any other aspect of the mission of the U.S.A. Committee for IAVAAN.
Mr. GILMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Delahunt.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and let me add my voice in expression of gratitude and appreciation for all you have done in this particular subject, particularly for holding this hearing, as you are well aware, that deals with something that is very dear to me as it is to all our colleagues who have adopted children from abroad.
When I wrote to you last December to request this hearing, we were just becoming aware of the dimensions of the problem that had arisen in regards to adoptions in Cambodia. And as others have said, at that time 13 American families seeking visas for their adopted children had been given appointments at the U.S. Consulate in Phnom Penh. Unfortunately, only after arriving there did they discover that serious questions were being raised by U.S. officials as to whether their children had been made available for adoption through improper means. That was truly the beginning of an ordeal that would engulf not only those families but hundreds more who had been approved by our government to adopt a Cambodian child and found themselves caught up in a suspension of adoptions from Cambodia by our government. This suspension was imposed on the 21st of December.
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And as I am sure you are aware, over the course of these months congressional offices received disturbing accounts of families kept in the dark by U.S. Consular officials, treated with rudeness, insensitivity, disrespect and even warned not to contact their Members of Congress to complain about their treatment. We heard persistent allegations that these same officials were continuing to process applications for certain adoption facilitators who had been the subjects of investigations by both the United States and Cambodian governments. And we read reports and rebuttals that raised serious questions about the quality and thoroughness of the investigations that were conducted to determine whether the children in these cases were adoptable or not.
There is little doubt that serious abuses are taking place in Cambodia and many other sending countries. Birth parents are sometimes coerced or given improper inducements in exchange for their consent. Documents are forged and babies are bought and sold, and we must never condone these practices, and I fully support the efforts of the INS and the Department of State to eliminate them. But our government also has a responsibility to carry out those efforts in a manner that is responsible, discriminate, and respectful to those who are caught in the crossfire.
I want to also commend Commissioner Ziglar for recognizing this and for taking steps to deal humanely with the situation he encountered. I still have many unanswered questions about the actions by U.S. officials that precipitated this crisis, and I still have concerns about a number of cases in which adoptive families have even now been left without relief, but I want to thank the Commissioner for all he has done to alleviate this crisis and to prevent its recurrence.
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I know, Commissioner, you have made this something of a personal priority and it is deeply moving to all of us. The Cambodian experience has provided a vivid demonstration of the need to protect children and their families by bringing U.S. adoption practices into conformity with the international agreement known as the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. Congress began this process in 2000 by enacting the Intercountry Adoption Act and as one of the authors of that legislation, I have been working closely with the State Department and INS since that time to implement the law.
The Hague Convention will do much to improve adoption practices at home and abroad. It will require among other things that agencies be properly accredited, audited and insured, that they keep careful records and file public reports on their activities and that they take full legal responsibility for the conduct of their overseas agents and facilitators. It will require that families have access to detailed disclosures before selecting an agency and to an effective system for resolving complaints that arise in the course of the adoption process, and it will require our government to maintain ongoing lines of communications with the child's country of origin.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has expired. Do you need additional time?
Mr. DELAHUNT. If I have another minute, I will conclude.
Chairman HYDE. Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for another minute.
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Mr. DELAHUNT. Thank you for the additional time, and I will conclude by saying that even under the best of circumstances international adoption is a lengthy, expensive and an emotionally exhausting process, but our government should be doing all it can to ease these strings and not add to them for the 20,000 families who each year open their hearts and homes to children from overseas. I look forward to working with both the INS and the Department of State to achieve that goal.
I thank the Chair.
Chairman HYDE. We have some votes that have just been called. I am trying to find out what they are.
There are two votes, a vote on the rule on the bioterrorism bill and the Journal vote. So if the panel will exercise their patience we will hurry and vote and come right back. So we will stand in recess for a few moments.
[Recess.]
Chairman HYDE. The Committee will come to order. The gentleman from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Mr. Pitts.
Mr. PITTS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I will submit my entire statement for the record but would like to make a few comments. First of all, thank you very much for convening this important hearing to address an issue that is of special interest to many of us.
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Three of my own constituents have been directly impacted by the one aspect of the hearing today, the circumstances that have resulted from the moratorium issued on Cambodia adoptions. As a result of the adoption suspension issued last December, over 400 American families were trapped in the various stages of adoptions from Cambodia. Over 5 months have passed while families agonized over whether or not they would be able to bring their Cambodian child home.
Now, I understand that the adoption suspension was issued with the intent to prevent the trafficking of children, and I want to commend the commitment of the INS and the State Department to ensuring that babies are not being kidnapped or sold into adoption. However, I have been somewhat concerned that this suspension on adoptions was not issued with necessary care given the families involved.
It appears that this moratorium has brought to light the ambiguity of the division of responsibilities between the INS and the State Department in regard to international adoptions. The fiasco with Cambodian adoptions has focused new attention on procedures with the INS and the State Department and the joint role they play in facilitating international adoptions.
I hope we will address today where modifications are necessary to coordinate efforts and ensure that this kind of heartache does not happen again, and I hope it is clear to the INS that Congress will stand up for the families that are suffering as a result of this suspension and we will push to see a solution as quickly and as efficiently as possible. We must ensure that this situation does not repeat itself. We must address the problems within the system that allowed such havoc for so many families caught in the middle, and I am confident we can assess this situation, devise a way to protect the defenseless and ensure safe adoption procedures while also protecting the families from the pain endured in this situation.
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So I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today, and I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to address this matter, and I yield back the balance of my time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Pitts follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE JOSEPH R. PITTS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA
Mr. Chairman, thank you for convening this important hearing to address an issue that is of special interest to me. Three of my own constituents have been directly impacted by the one aspect of the hearing today—the circumstances that have resulted from the moratorium issued on Cambodian adoptions.
As a result of the adoption suspension issued last December, over 400 American families were trapped in the various stages of adoptions from Cambodia. Over five months have passed while families' agonized over whether or not they would be able to bring their Cambodian child home. Three families in my district—Eileen and Jefrey Christian, Michele Duvivier, and Michael and Dianne Papparo—have ached as they anxiously waited to bring their babies home.
This decision thrust many families, who were at various stages in the adoption process, into a painful chaos. These months have been agonizing for many families and still many cases have yet to be resolved, even six months later.
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I understand that the adoption suspension was issued with the intent to prevent the trafficking of children. I want to commend the commitment of the INS and State Department to ensuring that babies are not being kidnapped or sold into adoption. During my time in Congress I have been absolutely committed to protecting the innocent and fighting against the trafficking of defenseless people. However, I have been somewhat concerned that this suspension on adoptions was not issued with necessary care, given the families involved.
I am committed to ensuring other countries have the legal and procedural framework in place to ensure mothers are protected from having their babies sold into adoption without their consent. I am committed to fighting against the trafficking of people. However, I am also deeply committed to protecting our American families, my constituents, from becoming the victims of bureaucracy, victims of careless decisions.
I have a number of questions to raise today. It seems that this moratorium may have brought to light the ambiguity of the division of responsibilities between the INS and State Department in regard to international adoptions. The fiasco with Cambodian adoptions has focused new attention on procedures of the INS and the State department and the joint role they play in facilitating international adoptions. I would also like to address today whether modifications are necessary to coordinate efforts and ensure that this kind of heartache does not happen again.
I want to make it clear to the INS that Congress will stand up for the families that are suffering as a result of this suspension and we will push to see a solution as quickly and efficiently as possible.
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Just as important, however, we must ensure that this situation does not repeat itself. We must address the problems within the system that allowed such havoc for so many families caught in the middle. I am confident that we can assess this situation and devise a way to protect the defenseless and ensure safe adoption procedures, while also protecting the families from the pain endured in this situation.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to address this matter.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you.
Mr. Issa.
Mr. ISSA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will submit for the record. I look forward to hearing the testimony.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you.
Mr. Kerns.
Mr. KERNS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for having this important hearing. I would like to thank Mr. Ziglar and Ambassador Ryan for their participation today.
I, too, have been impacted and families in my congressional district, Dirk and Kathy Caldwell have been caught up in this very tragic, unfortunate and I hope not senseless delay in adoptions. I appreciate, Commissioner, that you have one of the most difficult jobs in government and I respect you for taking that on and it is very important to the country. It is very important to families.
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When I came to Congress, it was my hope to make the Federal Government more family friendly and the Congress more family friendly, and I know we are all working toward that end. I look forward to hearing your testimony today and your observations of ways that we can work together to make this a better place for families and advocates for the adoption of children.
With that, Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you, Mr. Kerns.
The gentlelady from Virginia has indicated that she has no opening statement at this time. So we will thank her and we will proceed to the witnesses.
I would like to welcome the Honorable James W. Ziglar, who was confirmed as Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in July of 2001. He is chiefly responsible for enforcing laws regulating the admission to the United States of citizens of other countries and for administering various immigration benefits. Mr. Ziglar has worked in various capacities in both the private sector and the Federal Government. Prior to his appointment as Commissioner, he was the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the United States Senate. I might add he did a wonderful job in that difficult position, keeping order in the other body. He also served as Assistant Secretary of the Interior and as a legislative and public affairs officer for the Department of Justice.
Welcome, Mr. Ziglar.
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Our next distinguished witness is Mary A. Ryan. She assumed the duties of Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs in May 1993. Ambassador Ryan entered the Foreign Service in 1966 and has served in various diplomatic positions in Naples, Mexico, Abidjan, and Khartoum and was assigned as Ambassador to Switzerland—I am sorry—Swaziland in 1988. Returning to Washington in 1990, Ambassador Ryan served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Consular Affairs. She was assigned as Director of the Kuwait Task Force following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs in the fall of 1991.
If you could summarize your statements in 5 or 10 minutes, give or take, your full statement will be placed in the hearing record. So we will start with you, Commissioner Ziglar.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE JAMES W. ZIGLAR, COMMISSIONER, U.S. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE
Mr. ZIGLAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. I welcome this opportunity to share with you our goals with respect to improving the Immigration and Naturalization Service's critical role in the international adoption arena. For those citizens who choose to open their hearts and their homes to children from abroad, as you know, the INS shares with the State Department the responsibility for adjudicating orphan petitions and enabling a child's immigration to the United States. Adjudicating orphan petitions, I have learned, is among the most sensitive adjudications that INS performs.
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INS works and is working to ensure that our efforts in upholding the law complement the commendable spirit that drives people to adopt children from abroad. Along with the obvious pressing security concerns that we have in the country and at INS these days, I also have put international adoptions at the very top of the agenda.
I believe that Congressman Delahunt and Congressman Lantos especially mentioned the situation—I am going off my text here, as I always do—that Americans find themselves in in the adoption arena sometimes, particularly when adopting from countries where they don't have a regulated system. When I first got involved in this in, I guess, late September, early October and started trying to parse through how the system worked, just practically how it worked for an American citizen adopting abroad, I was absolutely appalled at the way we do our business. The way we do our business is geared completely toward having a transparent, well-regulated system from the other side and, if their system isn't that way, our system is set up to cause a great deal of pain to American citizens.
So, if you notice in the announcement that we had on December 21 with respect to Cambodian adoptions, I think the last paragraph mentioned that we were going to try to review, revise, and fix a system that I think has been broken for a long time in terms of the way it works. So I share your concerns, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Delahunt and others who have mentioned this, about the system itself and the way it works and we are working very hard to fix that.
As you know, the circumstances that arose last year with respect to adoption of children from Cambodia and Vietnam obviously thrust me right in the middle of this problem very early in my tenure as Commissioner. Although I am the first Commissioner to suspend adoptions in that country, I am certainly not the first to have struggled with this very troublesome issue. The problems relating to baby buying, baby stealing and that sort of thing, as well as unregulated and unscrupulous agents and facilitators who prey on Americans, are an unfortunate part of the modern landscape in adoptions.
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Indeed, the Hague Convention, which Assistant Secretary Ryan is going to talk about in much more detail than I am today, was in fact drafted to address the kinds of things and kinds of problems that we saw in Romania and elsewhere earlier and that we are still seeing today in Cambodia.
Let me talk about Cambodia just for a minute. On December 21, after consultation with the State Department, I suspended processing in Cambodia because of the problems that were identified by the State Department and INS officers. Those problems were of such a nature that I could not really in good conscience allow operations to proceed as they were at that time. I remain convinced, based upon where we have been in those months, that it was the right thing to do and that we need to continue that suspension until Cambodia gets its legal adoptions framework into a way that is transparent and that is somewhat in conformity with international norms.
However, there were obviously humanitarian concerns, Mr. Chairman, you pointed them out and several Members have pointed them out, that were raised by individuals who were affected by that suspension and so Assistant Secretary Ryan and I took some extraordinary steps in early February. Actually it started in January, early in January, when I asked Phyllis Coven, who is heading our task force, to come back from a rather nice assignment in Johannesburg to take on this assignment and she did.
We started it in January, but in February Assistant Secretary Ryan and I created a special humanitarian initiative premised on the work of this task force that Phyllis is heading. I am pleased to report that through the task force case-by-case review more than 125 Cambodian children, whose official government paperwork had been completed prior to suspension, have been cleared for adoption. In fact, I think there are more now. Even some came in today.
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However, notwithstanding these happy endings, the task force work has confirmed the foundation of our concerns. Basically, the task force has identified cases in which there are two major problems. The first are cases in which birth parents are misled about the realities of leaving their children in orphanages. Second, there are cases involving incomplete or blatantly fraudulent documentation regarding the origin of the child and the circumstances surrounding the abandonment. Unfortunately, these issues may prevent the task force from being able to clear some of the cases for adjudication consistent with U.S. law.
Based on the progress of the task force and the information that our agencies have gathered, with, I might add, the tremendous help from congressional offices, from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, and prospective adoptive parents, who have been very cooperative in working with us, Assistant Secretary Ryan and I proposed a further initiative last week. Specifically, we announced a proposed expanded initiative to include those cases where the reliance on the United States Government and a bond, although not a legal relationship, with a particular Cambodian child was established prior to the suspension. This is a matter of diplomatic discussion between the State Department and Phnom Penh with respect to how that processing will go forward, but we have had some discussions with the Cambodian officials and as soon as we have something to tell you about those, we will brief the Congress as soon as we have that information.
Beyond addressing the immediate needs related to the suspension, we have also been attempting to address the broader picture in international adoptions. As Assistant Secretary Ryan will describe, U.S. citizens will reap substantial benefits, we believe, from the implementation of the Hague Convention, which will be implemented in the U.S. through the Intercountry Adoption Act, which will be implemented through regulations by the State Department.
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My goal, however, is to begin implementing some of the best principles contained in the Hague Convention as soon as possible. I take it as my mission to create better, more transparent and user-friendly operational procedures to govern adoptions as soon as possible, especially for those countries that are not signatories to the Hague Convention. To fulfill that mission, I appointed some time ago an INS task force which is comprised of our best, most experienced managers and field staff. We have already been consulting with government, nongovernmental stakeholders and others in trying to create a dialogue as to how we best can go through that.
I want to conclude by talking about the four main objectives of the task force. The first is to improve communication. We need clear guidance to prospective parents and adoption agencies and other stakeholders on how the process works, what to expect at each stage and the legal requirements that must be met. This is important. We must make sure that prospective adoptive parents understand that adoption and immigration are separate processes and that, for example, fulfilling the adoption requirements of a foreign sending country does not necessarily mean that American immigration requirements have been met.
Second, we want to improve operational performance. Our current procedures work fine for people who are adopting, as I said earlier, from countries where they have got a nice, regulated, transparent procedure. What we are trying to do is avoid the heartbreak of those people who get caught in the middle because there is a system over there that doesn't comport with the way we do our business here. This problem will be addressed largely by the Hague Convention with respect to those countries that have adopted the Hague Convention. However, it doesn't allow for those countries that have not. It won't affect them and what we need to do. Bottom line here is if there is a child out there to be adopted that the parents that are going to adopt that child, maybe even before the child is identified to them, know that that child can immigrate to the United States because they meet our definition of an orphan.
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And let me tell you what we are trying to do here. We are trying to create—and I think we will have this thing created by July 1—a pilot program for prospective parents where a prospective parent from one of the nonregulating countries, a country where we have got a problem, and we have identified about six or seven that we want to open this pilot in, where a parent can petition us to make a determination with respect to a child that may be identified to them but they haven't bonded with them, they don't know them, go ahead and make that determination before they have to go through a formal adoption procedure and then file that so-called I–600 and get that approval so that we know and they know that when they go over to go through that final legal adoption procedure that they are going to get the visa for that child. This is a pilot project that we are working on and we hope to introduce it in early July. We call it Adjudicate Orphan Status First.
Third, we want to develop improved training and guidance. I won't go into all of what we are going to do, but it is clear to me that we have had throughout the world inconsistent ways of going about adjudicating, that we have not trained our people or provided them the right kind of guidance like we should have, and so we have had a lot of inconsistencies.
We are calling together, from June 17 to June 21, a training seminar, and we are bringing in people from literally all over the world who are involved in this from the INS to give them a week-long training on not only the pilot project and how that is going to operate, but how we go about doing our business. I think having clear guidance and better training will help us in how we do our business.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Commissioner, one of the occupational hazards of holding hearings is voting on the floor. We have been advised there is a vote on the rule on the Customs Border Security Act. So we will stand in recess while we vote. We will return as soon as possible after this one vote.
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Mr. ZIGLAR. Mr. Chairman, I am finished. It is just fluff talk from here on.
Chairman HYDE. We have some fluff questions for you when we return.
[Recess.]
Chairman HYDE. The Committee will come to order.
Commissioner, we abruptly terminated your statement. Were you finished?
Mr. ZIGLAR. I was, Mr. Chairman. I was just going to summarize what I had previously said. Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
Chairman HYDE. Your full statement will be made a part of the record. We will have some questions later.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ziglar follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE JAMES W. ZIGLAR, COMMISSIONER, U.S. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:
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I welcome this opportunity to share with you my experience and objectives with respect to improving the Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) critical role in the international adoption arena. For those United States citizens who choose to open their hearts and homes to children from abroad, the INS shares with the Department of State responsibility for adjudicating orphan petitions and enabling a child's immigration to America.
The circumstances that arose in connection with the adoption of children from Cambodia and Vietnam in recent months thrust the INS into this issue early on in my tenure. The experience brings into sharp focus the many aspects of INS' global responsibilities: the interaction between our domestic and overseas offices and the Department of State, the interaction between U.S. immigration laws and the laws of the foreign sending countries, and the direct impact our work has on the hopes and dreams of United States citizens.
I am committed to working with you to improve INS' contribution to international adoptions. Along with the pressing security concerns of the day, I have made international adoptions a top priority for the INS. One of my first initiatives was to create a special Adoptions Task Force with clear and immediate objectives that I will outline in detail later. The Task Force was created to undertake a special humanitarian initiative to review certain adoption cases in Cambodia. The Task Force has also undertaken a comprehensive review of the existing INS structure for dealing with international adoptions.
My purpose here today is to share with you the INS' role in international adoptions, and more importantly, what INS plans to do to improve the international adoption process. First, I will summarize the context in which international adoptions are currently taking place. Then I will discuss with you how the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Inter-country Adoptions (the Hague Convention), and the Inter-country Adoptions Act of 2000 (IAA) are changing—for the better—how the United States Government processes international adoptions. Finally, because the IAA will not be implemented until 2004 and is not designed to change how we deal with countries which have not signed the Hague Convention, I will outline the additional measures I have asked the Adoptions Task Force to implement as soon as possible. These include both a special service to assist Americans adopting in certain more difficult countries, as well as short and long term process improvement measures.
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LARGELY POSITIVE CONTEXT FOR INTERNATIONAL ADOPTIONS
The suspension of orphan visa processing in Cambodia was implemented for good reason: there are serious deficiencies in the Cambodian legal framework on adoptions, and there are very real human trafficking concerns. However, the controversies that have arisen recently in connection with Cambodia and Vietnam must not make us lose sight of the largely positive context in which we do our work. Although in need of improvement, the current procedures that are in place have worked for thousands of U.S. families each year. The majority of cases have happy endings.
INS' RESPONSIBILITIES
To the child
The INS' determination that a child is an orphan as defined under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and is, therefore, eligible for immigration to the United States, is among the most sensitive adjudications we perform. In performing this task, the INS must bring to its work a core commitment to protect the interests of the child, which is at the heart of the process. Under the current statutory framework, we are obligated to make a determination as to whether or not this child is indeed an orphan—that is, a child without parents, as defined under the INA, and to uphold the laws that have been created to protect children in this process.
To the parents
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We also have a weighty responsibility to the American citizens—the prospective adoptive parents—who have invested their hearts, and often considerable resources, in this endeavor. The immigration process associated with adoption should not diminish the joys of providing a home to a child, but at the same time there are laws and procedures that must be honored. The INS must work to ensure that our efforts in upholding the law complement the commendable spirit that is at the core of the decision to open one's heart and home to a child.
INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
Another factor that makes the international adoption process complex is that foreign countries in which parents seek to adopt are often characterized by extreme poverty and the accompanying societal uncertainties and pressures. These same countries may be struggling to establish the sound legal frameworks and well regulated adoption processes which would bring integrity to the intercountry adoption process and which make compliance with our immigration laws simpler. Also, even in relatively well-developed countries with strong legal systems, the legal adoption requirements can vary from country to country, even as they vary from state to state here, making the challenge of cooperation all the more complex and important.
INS' OTHER PARTNERS
Furthermore, INS' role in adjudicating international adoptions depends—perhaps more than in any other area—on extensive coordination between INS' domestic and overseas operations, and with the Department of State, as well as numerous state and private adoption agencies. The immigration and adoption process most often begins in the United States with INS' adjudication of the initial Form I–600A (Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition). However, the documentation supporting it—home studies and background checks—must come from domestic social service entities and law enforcement agencies.
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Another unique facet of adoptions is that the INS shares its responsibilities for adjudicating cases overseas with the Department of State. INS officers stationed overseas are responsible for adjudicating petitions in the 37 countries in which they are present. In the remaining countries throughout the world, State Department officers have the same responsibility.(see footnote 1) In those countries, INS only sees those petitions if the Department of State requests our assistance in cases which the Department of State finds are not ''clearly approvable,'' as was the case in Cambodia. United States law enforcement officers working in this field face many difficult challenges. When the INS or Department of State determines that an investigation is necessary, the investigation may involve working with one another, with foreign officials tasked with preventing child buying and human trafficking, and with other governmental and non-governmental organizations in the foreign sending state.
THE PROMISE OF THE IAA AND HAGUE CONVENTION
It may seem like a daunting task to improve the process. However, as Assistant Secretary Mary Ryan has just outlined to you today, the Hague Convention and Intercountry Adoptions Act will provide some clear guidance and direction. I will talk a bit about how elements of the Hague Convention will affect how INS processes international adoptions, and then tell you how the Adoptions Task Force is looking to borrow from the Hague Convention and from the best practices in the field to make important changes and improvements to our process in the shorter term, and in countries where the Hague Convention will not apply.
As Assistant Secretary Ryan explained, one of the most important improvements to international adoptions, implementation of the Hague Convention through the Inter-country Adoption Act, is already underway. The Hague Convention and the IAA were created in response to precisely the kinds of concerns that gave rise to the suspension of adoptions in Cambodia: concerns about exploitation and child buying, the insidious activities of criminal elements who exploit the adoption process for profit, and problems related to countries whose laws are vulnerable because of weak controls. Although the Hague Convention and the IAA will not, by their express terms, apply to orphan petitions filed for children from non-Hague Convention countries, I believe that the Convention and the Act will provide models that can help improve the processing of non-Hague Convention orphan cases.
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As Assistant Secretary Ryan has outlined for you, the process for implementing the IAA to integrate the mandates of the Hague Convention is on track and is in the Department of State's hands as they are the lead agency. INS will continue to support the Department of State in establishing its new role as the Hague-designated U.S. ''Central Authority'' in the intercountry adoption process.
The Hague Convention and the IAA will help us enormously. They will require that the child's eligibility to immigrate be determined before either adoption or placement for adoption may occur in countries party to the Hague. This will be a significant departure from the current regulatory process that allows a child to be adopted before eligibility to immigrate to the U.S. is established. The Hague Convention will also significantly expand the universe of children who are available for adoption and who can immigrate to the United States. It will not be necessary for each child adopted from a Hague Convention country to be an orphan, as currently defined in the law. In this respect, it will ease some of the difficulties inherent in our adjudications. In Hague Convention countries, the INS will also be able to rely on a Certificate of Final Adoption or Custody issued by the foreign country's designated ''Central Authority'' as evidence of relationship between the child and the adoptive parent(s). This certificate, together with the original adoption decree, is evidence that the child is eligible to immigrate to the United States.
The Hague Convention also provides for counseling for all prospective adoptive parents. The accreditation process for adoption service agencies will help ensure that prospective adoptive parents and our immigration officers know which agencies are committed to meeting certain professional standards. Requirements for transparency in fees charged by accredited agencies can help deter child-buying and inappropriately high fees. Changes like these will assist prospective adoptive parents and our adjudicators in making the most informed, balanced decisions possible.
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The IAA does not, however, end our responsibilities to be diligent in protecting children, and to ensure that the availability of processes for overseas adoption do not lead to exploitation of children, birth parents, and adoptive parents. And we would be wrong not to anticipate that there will be new dilemmas and challenges that we must tackle creatively, particularly during the early stages of implementation. But it is fair to say that it is going to help.
However, these changes are not scheduled to take place until 2004, and some of the very poor and underdeveloped countries which do not have fully transparent processes and with which the INS and the Department of State are struggling to make fair determinations today are not signatory to the Hague Convention. For these reasons, I asked the Adoptions Task Force, in their review of our current policies and regulations, to recommend steps that could move us as quickly as we can towards processes for all countries that are more consistent with the Hague Convention. The final portion of my testimony today will outline the progress that the Adoptions Task Force has made so far, and where we are headed.
THE ADOPTIONS TASK FORCE—WORKING METHODS
The Task Force has been working to achieve two important goals. The first goal is to provide safeguards for American adoptive parents similar to the safeguards provided under the Hague Convention and the IAA. I will call this the ''adjudicate orphan status first'' initiative. The second goal is one of process improvement, including better communication, training, field guidance, and targeted regulatory changes. I think you will be as pleased as I am with the practical but high-yield changes and improvements we are in the process of implementing.
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To make certain that the INS takes every possible measure to try and prevent another situation like the one in Cambodia and Vietnam that occurred in the past few months, I appointed a Task Force comprised of some of our best, most experienced managers and field staff to identify and address key challenges as quickly and thoroughly as possible. The Adoptions Task Force has already embarked on the first of a two-part consultative process with governmental, non-governmental, and community based stakeholders. This process will identify service and enforcement issues of concern and will ensure that stakeholders have the opportunity to raise questions, provide information, and propose solutions. Based on concerns raised by governmental and non-governmental stakeholders, the Adoptions Task Force conducted a series of intensive internal reviews with experienced INS and State Department officers to respond to each of the issues raised in the most appropriate way.
In addition to the general proposals which I will outline to you today, we will conduct another round of consultations with stakeholders to let them know what we are proposing, and outline our short and long term strategies for improving the process. Finally, we will hold an ''Adoptions Summit'' during the week of June 17, 2002, bringing together key INS and State Department personnel from domestic and overseas posts to provide intensive training. The training will ensure that government officers involved in adjudicating adoption cases and investigations relating to potential problems with home studies and incidents of child-buying and trafficking, will be able to implement policies and guidance in a uniform and efficient manner. A final presentation of changes to the adoptions process will also be presented to congressional staff, NGOs, and community based stakeholders.
INTRODUCING ''HAGUE-CONSISTENT'' SAFEGUARDS FOR AMERICAN ADOPTIVE PARENTS: THE ''ADJUDICATE ORPHAN STATUS FIRST'' INITIATIVE
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Of all the changes the Task Force will address, the single most important operational improvement will be to introduce safeguards similar to the Hague Convention process for American adoptive parents as quickly as possible in certain more problematic countries. We are calling this the ''adjudicate orphan status first'' initiative.
The most serious problem with international adoptions is that in many countries, the process by which governments decide that birth parents are no longer providing care for their child and that the child is available for intercountry adoption is not always transparent.
As a consequence, some American prospective adoptive parents have experienced the heartbreaking situation in which they have traveled abroad and adopted a child, only to discover that the child does not meet the orphan definition and cannot immediately immigrate to the United States. For example, sometimes a foreign country allows Americans to adopt a child who is not an orphan because their laws are different than ours. Sometimes, particularly in poor and underdeveloped countries, unregulated and unscrupulous agents and facilitators take advantage of inadequate infrastructure and safeguards to lead American prospective adoptive parents to believe a particular child is an orphan when a professional review of the paperwork reveals serious problems and irregularities.
As I mentioned before, under the Hague Convention, signatory governments will be responsible for certifying that a child is eligible to immigrate under the laws of the prospective adoptive parents' country before they allow the adoption to take place. But prior to the Hague Convention being implemented and for non-signatory states, we are exploring ways to offer a voluntary service to prospective adoptive parents who are thinking about adopting in certain countries, in essence, to adjudicate orphan first. We are in the process of developing this process with the Department of State, and look forward to being in a position to share the details on this proposal shortly.
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Improving the Adoptions Process
While exploring a voluntary ''adjudicate orphan status first'' service is the single most important initiative we have undertaken, the Task Force is also seeking to improve the process in three additional ways. The first has been to seek to improve communications with congressional staff and non-governmental stakeholders. The second is to improve internal processes, through documenting existing procedures, identifying best practices, and providing guidance in the form of field manuals, training materials, worksheets, and checklists. The third is to identify and begin working on longer-term goals, including centralized coordination within INS, and procedures and regulatory changes that require some time to implement.
Communication
We will do our best to ensure that clear guidance is provided to prospective parents, adoptions agencies, and other stakeholders on how the process works; what to expect at each stage in the adoption process; and the legal requirements that must be met for a child to immigrate to the United States in an international adoption. We continue to seek to explain to prospective parents that adoption and immigration are separate processes, and that, for example, fulfilling the adoption requirements of a foreign sending country does not necessarily mean that American immigration requirements have been met. We encourage other stakeholders, such as adoption agencies, to meet their own responsibilities in this regard. We will also continue to encourage domestic INS offices, and overseas posts, to communicate, openly and regularly with all the stakeholders in the adoptions process, including adoption agencies and prospective adoptive parents. As always, we seek to ensure that the latest information is available on the INS and State Department web-sites, so that everyone involved in the process has access to the best and most recent information available.
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Process Improvement—Short Term Initiatives
The Adoptions Task Force, with assistance from the State Department, will be organizing a week-long training for new and experienced adoptions adjudicators working in domestic and overseas locations. A comprehensive range of updated and new materials will be introduced through this training, including policy guidance, training modules, worksheets, checklists, flow charts, and sample ''best practices'' standard letters and other communication techniques. The training will use real cases to walk our officers through the best techniques for working with prospective adoptive parents, evaluating evidence, and communicating their decisions. While much of the material developed for the training was obtained by identifying and documenting existing best practices, we have also developed some guidance in areas where policies needed to be developed and articulated, such as for conducting investigations involving possible child-buying, smuggling or trafficking.
This training, which encourages the use of standardized adjudication tools whenever possible, will provide more detailed guidance on the application of legal definitions and standards, and new guidance on when and how to conduct investigations, will improve the consistency and quality of our adjudications, and will provide our officers with a more consistent understanding on responsibilities under the regulations. We will also continue to encourage an open, constructive cooperation with prospective adoptive parents, which will help to ensure that the process is transparent and user-friendly.
Process Improvement—Long Term Initiatives
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I recognize that the task we have set for ourselves—to introduce an important new pilot program to assist prospective adoptive parents, while at the same time improving our existing guidance and training tools and developing new ones—is very ambitious. But I believe that we can do it. The Adoptions Task Force has informed me that their initiative has been met with overwhelming support and enthusiasm from our field staff, who have been eager to donate their time to identifying best practices, developing guidance to improve quality and consistency, and even raising their own ideas about areas where they would like to receive additional guidance and suggested regulatory changes. This enthusiastic support has enabled the Adoptions Task Force to meet its ambitious goals.
Realistically, however, many of the processes begun by the Task Force will need to be shepherded through complicated clearance procedures, regulatory changes, automation updates and structural changes. For that reason, I am pleased to announce that we have identified a senior INS manager with extensive experience both in adjudications and overseas processes who will play a coordinating, policy development and oversight role for INS.
While these plans for longer-term changes will continue to develop, we have already identified some important priorities. The first, as we noted above, is to work closely with the State Department to introduce provisions consistent with the process envisioned in the Hague Convention and the IAA into our regulations for adoptions in non-signatory states, while encouraging all governments to sign the Convention or adopt comparable measures in their domestic law. The Adoptions Task Force is already in the process of drafting language for proposed regulatory changes for this and a number of other areas to bring our regulations into line with the IAA and anti-trafficking initiatives that were introduced after the regulations were last amended. Completion and clearance of standard operating procedures, an automated database to track and process cases, and a centralized authority within INS are among the other initial recommendations made by the Task Force for more careful consideration in the coming months. As was the case with the Adoptions Task Force, these longer-term initiatives will include extensive, open consultation with all governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in the process.
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CONCLUSION: CAUTION THAT THE PROCESS WILL NEVER BE SIMPLE
Improving the immigration determinations for which INS is responsible has been a matter of the highest priority for the Service since I have become Commissioner. I believe that we have a plan that will take us in the right direction. Yet I must introduce a note of caution. We cannot lose sight of the fact that many international adoptions take place in the context of some of the poorest and most unstable and underdeveloped nations in the world. Even with the significant improvements to our process that will be introduced by the Adoptions Task Force, the introduction of the IAA, and some of our longer-term regulatory and structural improvements, we will still face a complex and difficult situation in many of the countries from which Americans seek to adopt. Unregulated and unscrupulous agents and facilitators, including those that operate on the Internet, will continue, to try to insinuate themselves in the process, and to exploit the necessarily complex layers of interaction between agencies of different governments. We will need to continue to be vigilant that American citizens and the U.S. government do not unintentionally contribute to a situation where baby selling and buying can occur.
In conclusion, while I am realistic about the challenges we face, I am still confident that we can make considerable progress in a relatively short time in improving the adoptions process. By focusing on our main goals—a special initiative to ''adjudicate orphan status first'' to assist American prospective adoptive parents; better communication; clear field guidance and training; close coordination with all of our partners; and a longer-term, centrally coordinated regulatory structure to improve operations and introduce international standards—we can achieve something all of our stakeholders will appreciate and benefit from. This concludes my testimony and I look forward to responding to any questions that you may have.
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Chairman HYDE. Ambassador Ryan.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE MARY RYAN, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR CONSULAR AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Ms. RYAN. Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee, I am pleased to have the opportunity today to discuss international adoption and the role that the Hague Adoption Convention will play in helping to ensure transparency in the process, and provide protection to the child, the birth parents, and the adoptive parents.
I would like to outline the steps that we are taking to implement the Convention, and describe how the Convention and its implementing regulations will work to eliminate the current problems we see.
As we heard from Members of the Committee, the number of children adopted from abroad by U.S. citizens is increasing steadily. In fiscal year 2001, American citizens adopted 19,237 children from around the world, an increase of 18 percent from just 2 years ago.
I believe these adoptions have had a positive influence on the fabric of American life, and families throughout the United States have been enriched by the addition of these children. While intercountry adoption has had a positive impact on American families, the process is complex and can be very daunting. The paperwork involved, coupled with foreign laws and procedures, often make the process even more difficult.
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While the majority of intercountry adoptions by American citizens are completed without difficulty, unforeseen problems and serious irregularities have led to heart-wrenching situations for some. One means of dealing with and avoiding these difficult situations is the Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention. We appreciate this Committee's hard work on the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, and that will ensure the full and uniform implementation of the Convention throughout the United States.
The Convention establishes standards for protection for all parties involved in adoptions, and should help to streamline the process and protect its integrity. This will enable more children around the world to be part of a loving, supportive family, a goal we all share, and one every child deserves. Since enactment of the Intercountry Adoption Act on October 6, 2000, the State Department has worked closely with the INS and the Department of Health and Human Services to prepare Federal regulations to implement the Convention and the act in the United States.
During this process and consistent with congressional intent, we have repeatedly sought and included the input of the adoption community in the United States and qualified experts in intercountry adoption. The draft regulations are currently under internal review within the State Department, and we hope to submit them to OMB this summer and then publish the proposed rule in the Federal Register for public comment.
Simultaneously, we hope to enter into an agreement with one or more entities to accredited agencies and individuals wishing to provide adoption services under the Convention. Our goal is to complete the initial phase of accreditation by the end of 2003 and have a convention entered into force in the United States in 2004.
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We see a number of major problem areas in international adoptions that we believe will be ameliorated by the Hague Adoption Convention. First, there are instances when the child has been adopted in his or her country of origin by U.S. citizen parents, yet is unable to immigrate to the United States with them. This occurs when a child comes to the U.S. Embassy for a visa and upon review of the adoption papers, the visa officer determines that the child is not an orphan under the definition in the Immigration and Nationality Act, and therefore is ineligible to immigrate.
The Convention and our implementing legislation require that a child be determined eligible to immigrate to the United States before the actual adoption or custody proceeding occurs. This will prevent parents from finding themselves in the traumatic situation of having a child for whom they are legally responsible under the laws of the sending country, but who cannot legally immigrate to the United States.
Another major problem in the United States is the lack of uniformity of State licensing. Most States do not have specific standards covering intercountry adoption. In fact, it is possible for agencies and individuals to provide international adoption services without being licensed in any State. Under these circumstances, it is extremely difficult to hold adoption agencies and individuals accountable if problems arise. Likewise, agencies currently cannot be held accountable for the actions of their agents or facilitators abroad, many of whom are untrained or unlicensed to provide adoption services. The Convention and implementing legislation will establish for the first time minimal Federal standards for the accreditation of adoption service providers. As part of the standards, agencies will also be held responsible for the actions of their facilitators abroad. A third problem is that some adoptive parents have not been adequately counseled prior to completin