Europe: French Courts Prosecute and Sentence Child Traffickers and Child Purchasers

For the four years from 2001 to 2005, in a scheme similar to one that I wrote about in Bulgarian Mothers Tricked Into Selling Babies, pregnant Bulgarian women were recruited under false pretense, taken abroad, and then ultimately made to give up their babies for adoption.

Once again, the women (many of whom, in this case, were believed to be prostitutes) were promised money and then taken out of Bulgaria in order to give birth. In this case, however, the country of destination--the country where their children would be sold and illegally "adopted"--was France instead of Greece.

In these cases, unlike those involving Greece, it does appear that the women, prior to being taken abroad, had been told that they would be giving up their babies for adoption.

In order to avoid paperwork snafus, when giving birth in France the Bulgarian mothers routinely did so under the alias of the adoptive mothers. (Incidentally adoptive mothers are routinely called "buyers" throughout the European press reports). In this way adoptive parents were listed birth parents. No adoption proceedings or adoption papers were necessary.

Promised large amounts of money for their babies, the women instead received "only a fraction of the money promised them." According to press reports, individual babies sold for sums between 5000 and 7500 euros ($6700 US to $10,000 US). Bulgarian mothers were given a couple of hundred of these euros while the traffickers took the rest.

Additionally, adding yet another twist to the human trafficking and exploitation tale, after giving birth, many of the Bulgarian women were allegedly forced (by the trafficking network) to work in France as prostitutes or beggars.

France has aggressively investigated and prosecuted this case, presumably as a deterrent to those who would replicate the practices of this child trafficking ring or seek to buy children from involved in such schemes

Most of the purchasers of the babies were infertile couples. Many were Roma or gypsies who under French law, because of their nomadic life style, are not allowed to adopt through normal French adoption channels.

A defense lawyer, David-Olivier Kaminski, said the couples had been forced into a corner because France did not allow couples with roaming lifestyles to adopt children.

"These are French citizens, Gypsies, desperate to have children, who had no hope of meeting these strict adoption criteria," he said.

--from a Feb 2007 article in the BBC "Baby-smugglers jailed in France"

In Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, in late January 2007, France began prosecuting the cases; in February 2007, convictions and sentences were handed down.

The French authorities sought 11 members of the child trafficking ring. Three were not apprehended because they had fled, but were nevertheless tried "in absentia." All were convicted of "trading in human beings" and sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to six years. Five "ringleaders" received sentences of five or six years in prison. The remaining six "organizers" received sentences of two to five years.

Forty-one adoptive parents were also tried, convicted, and sentenced for their part in the scheme--for illegally "purchasing" the babies. Thirty-four adoptive parents received jail sentences ranging from six months to one year which were then suspended. Four adoptive parents received non-suspended jail terms of up to one year. One parent received a fine. Only two parents escaped sentencing altogether. Forty of the parents on trial were reportedly Roma (gypsy).

According to at least one press report, Bulgarian birthmothers were also prosecuted in the cases. However, press reports detailing convictions and sentences do not mention them. Without additional press reports in English, it is impossible to know whether any of them were convicted and whether they too received punishment for their part in these cases.

Babies originally taken into governmental protective custody when the case was uncovered, have been returned to their adoptive parents who will be allowed to keep them. Many have been allowed to begin legal proceedings to adopt the children.

Press reports include the following description of how one baby was sold and her existence reported to the legal authorities:

An 83-year-old man described buying a baby girl named Cinderella for his granddaughter in testimony on Wednesday in an infant trafficking trial in France.

The grandfather — referred to only by his first name, Jean — said he bought the baby in October, 2002, from a foreign Roma couple that passed by his house with the infant in their arms. He said he paid them €4,500 (US$5,850) for the baby girl, called Cendrillon, French for Cinderella.

Jean, a French Roma, said he bought the infant for his granddaughter — who could not have children because she and her husband are related. The couple registered the baby as their own, saying she had been born in their caravan.

--from a Jan 24, 2007 article in the International Herald Tribune, "83-year-old man tells of buying infant in France baby trafficking trial"

One wonders just how much of a deterrent such prosecutions will be when adoptive parents are ultimately allowed to keep the children they purchased....

In the future the cost and difficulty of court prosecution may well simply be factored into the cost of purchasing and procuring a child.

Perhaps France (as well as the rest of us) will have also learned a lesson about the lengths to which couples will go to procure a child.

Perhaps France will also consider dispensing with prejudices and opening up legal adoption to Roma citizens.

For myself, I am left wondering about whether the infertile and others have the "right" to adopt, the "right" to a child. Afterall, this is the lawyer's defense argument as quoted in the newspapers. It is the justification for the adoptive parents' willingness to illegally purchase children and lie about their true origins.

Where there is such intense demand for human babies can human trafficking for adoption really be stopped? Where such intense demand exists, is adoption really, as the rhetoric goes, for the children?

How do the rights of the child as set forth in the International Treaty on the Rights of the Child interplay with any of this?

Desiree

Child Trafficking Trial Involving Bulgarian Network Starts in France, January 22, 2007

French baby-smuggling case begins, BBC News, January 22, 2007

83-year-old man tells of buying infant in France baby trafficking trial, International Herald Tribune, January 24, 2007

Dozens go on trial in Paris for baby trafficking, International Herald Tribune, January 22, 2007

Alleged baby traffickers on trial in France, January 22, 2007

Baby-smugglers jailed in France, BBC News, 2 Feb 2007

Adoptive Parents in France Defend System of Buying Babies, International Herald Tribune, July 27, 2007

Europe: Bulgarian Mothers Tricked into Selling Babies

Curious about a sentence or two (in the BBC's story on child-trafficking) that alluded to the smuggling of pregnant Bulgarian women into Greece for child-trafficking purposes, I have spent the last few days researching and reading about the practice.

Here is what I've found....

According to BBC and other news reports listed below, the scheme is one that is played out hundreds of times a year.

An impoverished Bulgarian woman (who just happens to be pregnant) is approached and offered a "lucrative" job in Greece. She is told she will be given travel expenses, housing, and most important of all, the opportunity to work and earn good money.

Wanting to better her life, she jumps at the chance.

However, when she arrives in Greece, she finds there is no job.

Instead, the pregnant woman is sequestered--literally locked away... ...in an apartment with other pregnant women. There she stays--fed and housed but unemployed (except for the work her body is doing in gestating her child--the real "work" her "employers" were interested in all along) until the day that she gives birth.

Alone in a country where she knows no one, cut off from communication with home, prevented from leaving the apartment, having no money with which to support herself or with which to return home should she manage to escape, she has no recourse but to stay and wait...until she gives birth to the precious product she is producing...an adoptable child.

Meanwhile, arrangements are made to sell the child she is carrying.

Housed, fed, and cared for until she gives birth, the "birthmother's" care status will change with the birth of her child.

If she sells her child to her captors, she will be paid approximately 3,000 Euros and will continue to be cared for and eventually transported back to Bulgaria.

However, if she does not sell the child, then she and her vulnerable newborn will be turned out onto the street to fend for themselves. The reality of the prospect of caring for herself--a newly postpartum mother--and her tiny newborn baby, without local contacts, without a job, not knowing the local language, and with no money with which to buy food or shelter or with which to return home is ridiculous. The woman, of course, knows this.

She is--away from family, home, and community and the support it provides--at her most vulnerable.

She is trapped.

Through trickery and skillfully arranged circumstances, she is all but forced to "voluntarily" relinquish her newborn child.

Almost immediately after birth the child is transferred to the care of his or her previously identified adoptive parents--parents who have paid six times as much money for the child as his/her mother was been paid.

The woman who has produced the child receives about 3,000 Euros, while the organized crime ring which has "facilitated" the "adoption," receives about 20,000 Euros.

According to news sources, hundreds of women thus make the journey from Bulgaria to Greece, each year. Hoping for a better life through gainful employment, they instead find themselves captive and through circumstance forced to sell their own children.

Many of the women thus duped are Roma or gypsies. Typically unemployed, many live in squalid poverty in one of the wealthiest regions in Bulgaria. Their own poverty, a contrast to the wealth around them, serves as an ever-present motivator for them to change their lot in life. They would like to live like this. Those who prey on them know this. They know that their desire to do better in life will help to blind their eyes to dangers they would ordinarily see.

Those who prey on these women also know that there are equally desperate persons in Greece. With one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, the demand for babies in Greece is very high. The number of babies legally available for adoption, however, is very tiny.

Experts estimate [that there] are currently 500 couple waiting to adopt [the] just 54 babies available across the country.

Combine the high demand and the serious dearth of legally adoptable babies, with a highly complicated, long, and bureaucratic adoptive process that may easily take up to five years to complete, and many couples decide either that the process may never work for them or else that is simply too long and too complicated.

Frustrated infertile couples get tired of waiting--waiting for the child that realistically may never come to them. Having the money to pay for a child and the burning desire to parent, they turn to the black market.

Where there are copious amounts of available money, high demand for a particular product, and little legal hope for filling that demand, criminals and organized crime has the opportunity to step in to fill demand and take make money.

Getting this trade under control has proved difficult.

[In 2006,] more than 20 suspected baby-traffickers and prospective buyers had been arrested in a series of police raids across Greece...

--news report in The Independent (as below)

This number is multiplied by the 33 people that the Bulgarian government has arrested on similar charges in the last 3 years since baby-trafficking was outlawed there. However, police believe these 33 people represent "only the tip of the iceberg." Eight separate cases of child-trafficking for adoption had been investigated in the first seven months of 2006 alone.

In its most recent report, Interpol says that Bulgarians have become the ringleaders of the European baby trading circuit and are being investigated in Greece, Italy, France, and Portugal.

But demand is increasing and the gangs are becoming wealthier, according to Greek police. 'The phenomenon is well organised, "said Dimitris Tsiodras of Athens police's organised crime unit. 'The gangs consist of five, 10, or even more people. You need such numbers in order to locate pregnant women [in Bulgaria], transport them through countries such as Austria and Italy to Greece, take them to hospital to deliver the baby and find a place for them to stay until the buyer is found." Most of the buyers--usually childless couples--are found in advance, and the baby is given away as soon as the mother leaves the hospital."

--news report in The Independent (as below)

As for the gullibility of the Bulgarian women...

It is not hard to see why women such as [the woman in the article] are prepared to follow anyone offering her a ticket out of this poverty. 'I was told that I would earn up to 45 Euros a day if I took the job in Greece. What do you think I should have done?'

Bulgarian mothers tricked into selling babies, The Independent, July 18, 2006

Criminal Groups From Bulgaria Among Leader in Europe's Child Trafficking Industry, Sofia Echo, 19 Jul 2006

Bulgarian babies for sale, BBC News, July 18, 2006

Watch a BBC Video Report on this issue: Pregnant Women Smuggled into Europe, BBC News, 18 July 2006
Desiree

Europe: BBC Exposes Trade in Bulgarian Children

Posing as a man who wanted to adopt a child for himself and his childless wife but who had been prevented from legally doing so because of a criminal record, a BBC reporter went underground in hopes of exposing the illegal trade in Bulgarian children.

Through contacts he found a man named Harry who, for the price of 50,000 to 60,000 euros ($69,000 to $82,000 US dollars), purported to be able to supply him with a child.

He was part of a criminal gang working out of the coastal resort of Varna - a popular destination for foreign holiday-makers.

Harry knew his business. The man boasted of trafficking both women and children across Europe and of a previous conviction in Germany for human trafficking. As the two drove away their initial meeting place of a petrol (gas) station, switching cars along the way to avoid being trailed, Harry proudly pointed out prostitutes that he had "put to work."

Then, chillingly, he said that children were now part of his portfolio. During a secret recording, he said he had successfully smuggled them into two countries - Norway and Germany.

Harry offered false Bulgarian adoption papers and detailed advice on how to smuggle the child across Europe and into the UK. Or, if preferred, for a price, he could provide passage of the child into the UK himself.

Harry offered the undercover BBC reporter his choice of children, showing photos of two possible children. The first was a "beautiful, little girl with dark hair, olive skin, and blue eyes" who was from a poor Turkish family. The second, a pale, blond haired girl.

Another day a few weeks later, Harry arranged for the prospective buyer to meet, in various ever-changing places, a few possible children: a toddler whose mother couldn't afford to keep her, a grandfather who was selling his grandchild without the knowledge of the child's mother, and a child being sold by her father because he already had seven children.

The BBC team turned the evidence they had gathered over to the authorities and Harry was arrested soon after.

The reasons that children are being offered for sale in Bulgaria are apparently several:

1) crushing poverty (makes it hard to support child and makes families desperate for money)
2) rampant, hard-to-control organized crime
3) social welfare organizations that are too new to be effective
4) children's rights laws that are also relatively new and therefore also not effective
5) the tradition within Bulgarian culture which says that the state should not interfere in family matters

Children are being offered for illegal adoption without any check on the motivations and purposes of the adopting persons. This leaves the children trafficked vulnerable not only for adoption by persons who might not otherwise be able to adopt, but for sexual exploitation and slavery.

Children might even become vulnerable for something that Harry himself mentions when meeting with the undercover BBC reporter--exploitation for body parts. (This is supposed to be an urban myth--the body parts thing--but it is interesting that the accused criminal trafficker himself mentions it. I pray that Harry is simply as ill-informed as the rest of us... and that he isn't speaking from his own knowledge as a human trafficker...)

That children have become valuable commodities in a world market keen for them is simply reality. That organized crime and ordinary criminals often exploit the market hunger for children by prying out of financially or otherwise extremely stressed and distressed families, their most vulnerable and exploitable members is also reality.

Anyone who continues to refuse to believe that the above could be true is simply either hopelessly naive or else has a personal stake in believing that it is not so.

Watch the film: BBC Films Baby Smuggler

Read the article:How BBC exposed Bulgarian baby trade, BBC News online, July 26, 2007

Bulgarian Man Caught Trafficking in Babies, SofiaEcho.com, July 27, 2007

BBC exposes Bulgarian baby trade, Focus News Agency, July 27, 2007

BBC Reveals Baby Trafficking Channel in Varna, July 27, 2007

Desiree