Today, Nov.13, 2015, another one of the regular meetings between the accredited agencies and the Ministry of Justice was held. During the meeting an update of the activity in the field of intercountry adoptions was made. It was announced that 7 more sessions of the Intercountry Adoption Council have been planned and should take place by the end of 2015.
The statistics shows that in the period from Jan.1, 2015 to Nov.10, 2015, about 500 dossiers of children have been received at the Ministry of Justice for the purposes of registration. During their next sessions the Intercountry Adoption Council will review the dossiers of 62 children that have already been registered for intercountry adoption: of those 32 children aged up to 3 years, 3 children aged 3-5 years, 9 children aged 5-9 years and 18 children above the age of 10 years.
There are about 1400 active applications of waiting candidate-adopters: of those about 1000 are candidates waiting for children aged 0-5 years and there are only 34 candidates waiting for children aged 9-12 years.
It was announced that a working group is working actively on some changes in the Family Code. Those changes will mostly be related to the possibility for adopted children, respectively their adopters, who could represent them, to seek information about the children's biological family and origin. The possibilities for setting up some bodies at the Social Ministry and providing such a service are being discussed.
A very important change will be the elimination of the subjective judgment of children's social workers regarding the adoptability of the children placed in foster families and Centers for Family Type Accommodation and for those children to be subjected to compulsory inscription in the register for adoption as soon as certain objective conditions occur. This will certainly increase significantly the number of the children that are registered for adoption.
The meeting was extremely positive and it shows the willingness of the Ministry of Justice, in their capacity of Central Authority, for complete transparency in their work.