Italy dealing with orphanages' closing: make a virtue of necessity

After the orphanages' closing in Italy: reflections on the outcomes. The new rules for fostercare and adoption in Italy. Following an initial success of the Hague Convention, with the number of international adoptions rising up due to the entering into the Convention of many sending countries (Russia, Belarus, Poland, Cameroon, Morocco, Costa Rica, Chile, Brazil...), problems have started to appear: many sending countries, in order to avoid any risk of children's trade, have restrained the scope of international adoption, requiring that children be held for long periods to explore in-country placement options, before any placement abroad. Indeed, nowadays it has became extremely rare for children under the age of one to be placed, with the immediate consequence of a recent consistent drop in the number of international adoptions. In addition, national laws (implementing the Hague Convention) have introduced complicated bureaucracy, different from country to country: e.g. in Italy it is compulsory to get the former approval by the Minor Court before any further step can be taken by the adoptive parents, while in China it is up to the Central Government the duty to accept applicants for adoption into the so called “Log in Date” Program and allow them to start the adopting process. As a result, only a tiny fraction of those who might want to adopt a child from another country are therefore able to succeed: in fact, only few of them can get an extended leave at work to accomplish with the adoptive-proceeding, and even less are able to bear the high costs of it. In light of the reflections above, several different contrasts between the Hague Convention and the Human Rights protection can be pointed out: 1- the international adoption itself could be considered as a violation of human rights, depriving children of their heritage birthright, of their original cultural, religious and national values; 2- an inexcusable human right violation is committed by those sending countries, which consider international adoption as “ultima ratio”, applicable only after children have already spent quite a long stay in national orphanages or institutions (with insufficient health care, non adequate education, and all the other foreseeable problems), waiting for a in-country adoption; 3- the Hague Convention, by imposing more and more requirements on both parties, have stretched out the overall length of the adoptive procedure, with the result that thousands of children every year are forced to stay in institutions, despite the fact that many adopting parents would be able and pleased to welcome them as soon as possible. The procedure outlined by the Hague Convention works at slow motion, since it requires a central check governed by the two national agencies of the sending and of the receiving country; each agency therefore has to gather information from local representatives as well as from the central agency of the other country. It is of immediate evidence that such a strict centralization takes much more time, than if the process was handled directly by the local representatives involved in the first steps of the procedure. The conflict described above, between the Hague Convention and the Human Rights protection, takes place in several countries. The current paper aims at analysing whether the contrast above could lead to the illegal violation of any human right, with the consequent need of a dramatic change in the operating scheme drawn by the Hague Convention.