WASHINGTON (CNN) — The United States on Wednesday joined an international treaty on adoptions — a move that will protect both children and parents, and make the State Department a central registry tracking all adoptions coming in and out of the country, officials said.Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Maura Harty presented the U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions during a ceremony in the Netherlands.”We would say that today is a good day for children and parents involved in intercountry adoptions,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.”This convention establishes international laws and procedures for intercountry adoption. Cases involving the Hague Convention are to ensure that adoptions occur in the best interests of the children.”
The agreement sets out what the State Department called “safeguards to protect the interests of children, birth parents and adoptive parents.”
It says children may be adopted by prospective parents outside their country only if there is proper and informed consent from the “family of origin.”
The treaty calls for authorities to make sure that birth parents haven’t been persuaded to give up their children in exchange for money, urging countries to take “all appropriate measures to prevent improper financial or other gain in connection with an adoption.”
The treaty covers the other end of the adoption process as well, calling on the country where the adoptive parents live to “prepare a report including information about their identity, eligibility and suitability to adopt, background, family and medical history.”
The rules begin governing international adoptions for the 66 signatory countries on April 1, 2008.
Several countries that are common points of origin for children adopted by Americans have not agreed to the treaty, including Vietnam, Russia, Ukraine and Ethiopia.
Related: U.S. Joins Overseas Adoption Overhaul Plan
The United States, the world leader in international adoptions, will join more than 70 nations committed to standardizing policies, procedures and safeguards to reduce corruption in the largely unregulated adoption marketplace.
A sharp departure from current practice, the provisions of the treaty could slow the process and frustrate prospective parents. But many more may be spared the broken promises and broken hearts of the current system, which includes no federal oversight of agencies working overseas. The system also has no sanctions against agencies that lure families with photos of unavailable children and encourage them to bribe foreign bureaucrats to expedite an adoption.
With a federal registry of approved agencies, families will have access to information that is currently unavailable. In the last seven years, Americans adopted almost 120,000 children from overseas, according to the State Department, which recently released preliminary data for 2007 showing a decline for the third year in a row.
Adoptions dropped from a peak in 2004, with 22,884, to 19,292 in 2007. Experts attribute the decline to more stringent eligibility in China, the most popular place for intercountry adoptions by Americans, and to on-and-off suspension of the international adoption program in Russia.
China sent 5,453 children to American families in 2007, down from 7,906 in 2005. Russia’s total dropped to 2,207, from 3,706 in 2006. Adoptions increased from Guatemala (to 4,728 from 4,135 in 2006), Ethiopia ( to 1,255 from 732) and Vietnam (up to 626 from 163). China has ratified the treaty; neither Ethiopia nor Vietnam has signed it; and Russia has signed but not ratified it.
