The Quebec government has suspended most new international adoption applications because of human rights and trafficking concerns.
The government says in a news release the system needs to be reinforced to ensure that adoptions are free of illegal practices, including abductions, sales and trafficking of children.
It says the moratorium will be in place while it develops a stronger framework to prevent those practices and also limit adoption failures that result in children entering the child welfare system.
Quebec says it’s following jurisdictions around the world that have decided to limit or review international adoptions, including France, the Netherlands, Denmark and South Korea.
Geneviève Poirier, the secretary and director-general of international adoption at Quebec’s Health Ministry, pointed to the province signing onto the Hague Convention in 2006, which was intended to prevent human trafficking and other abuses from occurring during the adoption process.
“When there are crises, civil wars, coup d’états, wars … what the convention says is once there’s a situation of instability in a country, international adoptions must stop,” Poirier said. “We aren’t able to guarantee that the children have just been displaced and we aren’t able to take every effort to find their extended families.”
Poirier said officials in Quebec, and around the world, were increasingly realizing that adoptions from agencies abroad might not have been meeting all the criteria of the Hague Convention, meaning that, in some cases, they were unsure if children had been bought or sold, or if every effort had been made to find their parents or families.
“The big takeaway is that this is being done to protect children,” she said.
Some types of international adoptions — individuals adopting extended family members, for example — will still be allowed to go forward, but those involving certified adoption agencies will stop.
The Canadian government says all provinces and territories have suspended adoptions from certain countries, including Georgia, Guatemala, Liberia, Nepal and Ukraine.