Word: french
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...heart of the international flap are six French nationals working for child relief NGO Zoe's Ark, who were arrested last Thursday as they prepared to spirit 103 Darfur orphans away from the Chadian city of Abéché on a chartered plane. According to press comments by Zoe's Ark colleagues in France, the unauthorized attempt to hustle the children out of the region flouted administrative procedure to obtain permission. Such time-consuming steps, they say, clashed with the greater humanitarian urgency of getting the orphans to care and safety in France. But Chadian authorities swooped...
...French lawyer for Zoe's called the entire matter politically motivated. But that position became harder to defend in the face of claims by another French relief organization that most of the 103 children were neither orphans - nor even Sudanese for the most part. Those allegations were reinforced on Thursday when two U.N. agencies said they?d managed to confirm 91 of the children had at least one parent, and most came from Chad. French media reports, meanwhile, quoted residents of Chadian villages claiming they'd seen some of the 103 children lured from their homes into trucks by visiting...
...attempts to remove the children from Chad. Adoption arranged by an organization not officially chartered for that function is also prohibited in France. Officials at Zoe's Ark explain their intention was to get the children to safety in France by any means, then initiate extraordinary procedures once on French soil to obtain special refugee status for the children. Though the youngsters were to be placed in foster home for care, Zoe's Ark said that the goal of the program in no way involved adoption - for profit or otherwise...
...Those assurances notwithstanding, the Chadians aren't the only ones with grave reservations about the NGO's methods or motives. "Taking [children] out in that manner is, in my view, illegal and irresponsible," French Secretary of State on Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Rama Yade told the daily Le Parisien. Yade said she'd warned Zoe's Ark back in August of her concerns about its rumored adoption practices. And while Yade said French officials still don't have enough detail to be able to confirm or refute the charges of child trafficking, she suggested the NGO knew...
...French Foreign Ministry had aired similar and repeated public misgivings over the Zoe's Ark mission after it began last May. Meanwhile, testimony gathered in France since Thursday's detentions led French legal authorities to open an investigation on the NGO on suspicions of "intermediary activity in unauthorized adoptions". Zoe's Ark officials have responded with repeated statements that their operation did not involve adoption. They've similarly explained that while their care in Chadian camps allowed most of the children to recover from the near fatal conditions they were found in, their continuously fragile physical and mental health requires...