As Interfax-Ukraine reports, such an agreement was reached in Kyiv at a meeting between Ukraine's Minister of Family, Youth and Sports Yuriy Pavlenko and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt in exchange for the American side's promise to fully open up for Ukraine the possibility of monitoring the lives of adopted Ukrainian children, despite the fact that Ukraine has not yet ratified the Hague Convention.
The Hague Convention is an international document that provides for and regulates the rules of intercountry adoption for countries that have ratified it. It implies extensive possibilities for oversight by the country of origin of the child over the family that adopted him or her.
Yuriy Pavlenko, answering questions from journalists, stressed that the first line of the Convention stipulates that in any country that has ratified it, priority should be given to national rather than foreign adoption. In his words, this should allay the concerns of a number of people's deputies who had previously refused to ratify this convention.
The minister said that today the adoption process for foreign citizens drags on for 1.5-2 years, whereas under the law it can easily be completed in 5-6 months. "For Ukrainian families this process is even more complicated, and in some cases the adoption process takes from 5 to 7 years," Pavlenko said, explaining this as the reason for the tendency for the number of adoptions of Ukrainian children by foreigners to outnumber those adopted by Ukrainian families.
"Today we want to create conditions so that domestic adoption becomes more of a priority, but we cannot completely abandon foreign adoption, because foreigners can adopt children who certainly will not be adopted in Ukraine," the minister said.
According to the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sports, in 2004 foreigners in Ukraine adopted more than 2,000 children (58.3% of the total number adopted in the past year), and of that number 723 children were adopted by American families. Among the countries from which American families take children for adoption, Ukraine ranks sixth after China, Russia, Guatemala, South Korea and Kazakhstan.
Answering questions from journalists, Yuriy Pavlenko said that today control over children adopted abroad is carried out through consulates, but in a very unreliable way, which is why very often representatives of Ukrainian authorities cannot obtain any information about children adopted abroad. In the minister's opinion, ratification of the Hague Convention would provide significantly more opportunities for such control. According to him, the Cabinet of Ministers had wanted to propose this convention for ratification before the end of the current session, but most likely the document will be put before the Verkhovna Rada in September.