Word: australian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...says it received about $3,420 last year from Victoria's Australian Support for Intercountry Aid (Children). President Glenys Chandler says she liaised closely with a number of families who adopted from MSS, and dealt with the agency herself, but was unaware of any problems. The Victorian Human Services Department is aware of two adoptions through MSS, but a spokesman says it had received "no approaches about the adoptions from India." One of the adopting families has told TIME that their two children were personally delivered to Australia by Dinesh Ravindranath, son of MSS's principals. "We would definitely like...
...Zabeen's adoptive parents are horrified by the revelations. "There isn't sufficient information available, and nobody capable of giving us the advice we need to sort it out," they say. A spokesman for Australian Attorney-General Robert McClelland says the allegations "show why there cannot be any relaxation of standards when it comes to verifying the identity of children adopted under the inter-country program." While he says the government "is endeavoring to improve Australia-wide practice in respect to overseas adoption," Zabeen's parents would like to see firm control taken, with foreign adoptions handled by federal rather...
...TIME has learned that Australian authorities had plenty of warning that MSS was a suspect agency and could have ended adoptions from it well before Zabeen's was processed. Five years earlier, a Western Australian family had their MSS adoption of a five-year-old girl canceled after an Indian court found the orphanage was lying when it said she had been abandoned. In reality, she'd been claimed by her uncle. Orphanage director Ravindranath told authorities the child was hallucinating when she insisted she had a family...
...archived files are recovered, but notes: "We are aware that MSS are not currently licensed by the Central Authority in India to undertake inter-country adoptions." Elsewhere in Australia, it was a different story. MSS admission papers reveal that after the W.A. case, children were adopted to Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland. Some of the documents bear the same suspiciously vague details of mother and address as Zabeen's MSS papers...
...unsuspecting Australian parents, the potential custody cases are a nightmare in waiting. But former Family Court Judge John Fogarty, who compiled a Victorian government report on inter-country adoptions, says the chances of the biological parents reclaiming their children are remote. "I wouldn't like to be acting for the Indian parents," he says. "You might get pro-bono lawyers, but the bottom line would be the best interests of the child, and that may be a one-way street. If you compared the position of the child in Australia returning to poverty in India, you would have...