Russia Suspends Adoptions to America

Russian officials have suspended allowing American parents to adopt Russian children.
Russia Suspends Adoptions to America
4/15/2010
Updated:
4/15/2010
Russian officials have suspended allowing American parents to adopt Russian children pending negotiations with U.S. officials.

Moscow hinted last week that it might halt the adoptions after the story broke of an American family that ’returned' their adopted son to Russia. Adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, from Tennessee, sent 7-year-old Artem Saveleva unaccompanied on a plane to Russia with a note in his bag reading that she would no longer take care of him. Artem was met at the airport upon landing by a person the family had hired over the Internet for $200.

The boy is normal and being taken care of in a hospital, Russian authorities say.

American officials will soon come to Moscow to talk to their counterparts to try to reach an agreement over the issue in order to resume the adoptions.

The two countries have no special bilateral agreement on adoptions. Both have signed on to Hague Convention on Private International Law, but Russia has never ratified it.

Fearing Russia would follow through on its threat to temporarily halt adoptions, American adoption agencies launched an Internet campaign to collect signatures calling on both presidents, Barack Obama and Dmitriy Medvedev, not to suspend adoptions. The agencies condemned the recent incident saying that it was a “singular case, but it was not indicative of thousands of Russian and American adopters.”