The US Embassy is conducting criminal investigations without
even a hint of probable cause. Their only justification is that a handful of
unrelated cases may have involved false documentation or false testimony. This
is like the police investigating you, searching your house, and sending your
children off to social services for several months, because your neighbor was
caught smoking pot. And they are literally holding our children hostage for
several months while they go fishing for incriminating evidence.
And make no mistake about it, most of their investigations
are nothing more than fishing expeditions.
Probable
Cause: An investigation should only be conducted if there is probable cause to
suspect criminality in that specific case.
The US Embassy is conducting investigations into adoptions in
an unethical manner by tricking, intentionally confusing, or intimidating birth
family members and witnesses, and in doing so planting false testimony into the
case files. This is called entrapment or coerced confessions, and is not
admissible as evidence. Or, sometimes, it appears that they just make stuff up.
Transparency:
The interviews should be conducted in a transparent manner. Trick questions are
not acceptable.
The US Embassy withholds the evidence that backs up their
allegations – they will not provide native language transcripts or recordings
of interviews. This obstructs follow-up investigations and impedes the
discovery of the truth. They cite their right to ask trick questions as their
justification: they don’t want anyone to know in advance what questions they
will ask, because they are afraid that people will know how to answer those
questions, as if the information they are seeking is so hard to guess. This is
a blatant violation of the legal principle of “discovery,” and is a form of
obstruction.
Discovery: All
evidence, including recordings of interviews conducted in the original
language, should immediately be supplied to all parties involved.
Further, when they conduct interviews, they prohibit the
presence of legal representation to protect the rights of everyone involved. For
a birth mother interview, only the birth mother is allowed into the room with
the investigator and the translator. A representative of the most powerful
government on the planet is meeting with a desperately poor and powerless
teenager. This is a clear violation of civil liberties, and an invitation for
abuse of power. They could not get away with this in any other setting. At the
US Embassy in Addis Ababa, however, they don’t believe that people have rights.
Right to an
Attorney: Interviews and depositions should be conducted jointly with
representatives present for all parties to an adoption (birth parents if known,
adoptive parents, and adjudicator). This is also part of discovery, and it ensures
that the rights of all parties are protected.
Even worse, the US Embassy is operating under the presumption
of guilt – assuming that we or others are guilty of child trafficking before
even initiating an investigation. Without proof, they are claiming that
children have been bought or stolen, and are approaching every case with that
assumption. The only problems they have actually found is that a handful of
cases involve falsified documents and false testimony.
Presumption
of Innocence: No assumption of guilt should be made without proof.
Investigators should remain objective, and if their objectivity is compromised,
they should be removed from the case.
However, the leap from false documents to accusations of
kidnapping is a giant leap indeed. There are many reasons why adults may weave
tall tales during an adoption that don’t even remotely involve child
trafficking. More importantly, a simple supply and demand analysis suggests
that the supply of “free” children in Ethiopia is much greater that the demand
for “free” children. Therefore, there is no incentive to buy or kidnap
children. Indeed, since the Ethiopian government processes
adoptions for free (the US government charges for its services), they are
actually paying us to adopt their kids – Ethiopian taxpayers are subsidizing
American families. The State Department has yet to put forward a logical
hypothesis as to why children, who are plentiful in Ethiopia, would be
purchased as part of an adoption.
Proof: If the
State Department is going to make claims of fraud or child trafficking, they
should supply proof that can be scrutinized and examined by independent third
parties (while respecting the privacy rights of those involved). The State
Department should not exaggerate its claims.
The State Department has an agenda, and that agenda is to
shut down Ethiopia for adoptions. To accomplish that goal, it is willing to
shred two key principles that our nation was founded upon:
Due Process
Presumption of Innocence
The vast majority of adoption cases are innocent of fraud. We
should not have to prove our innocence. Our only burden under the law is to
prove that our children are orphans. There is a huge difference between proving
orphan status and proving innocence from fraud.
Nobody wants fraud, least of all adoptive parents. But there
are right ways and wrong ways to stop fraud. The State Department has chosen
the wrong way and has shattered the credibility of the US government it
represents.
The irony is that by choosing to suspend civil liberties on
adoption cases, they are not actually finding that many cases of fraud – in
fact, they are finding far fewer than they should. Basic principles of statistics
suggests that, in a well run adoption system, about 5% of the cases should have
significant problems, and/or the problem cases will tend to cluster around
certain unmonitored variables. From what we know, only three cases in the last
year have found that had sufficient problems to reverse the adoption –
approximately 0.15% of the total – and it is not obvious that any of those
three cases involved were actual fraud related.
The failure to find confirmed cases of fraud means that their
approach is not working. But that is not unexpected. Auditing every case file
is likely to result in many more mistakes by the Embassy (false positives and
false negatives) then actual confirmed cases of fraud. Indeed, they don’t even
seem to know where or how to look for fraud. The crooks are not as dumb as
the Embassy seems to think they are. Therefore, the US government is punishing the
innocent while letting the guilty go free.
The cost in both dollars and human suffering is substantial. Some
American families are being forced to spend thousands of dollars to prove the
absence of fraud in their cases, when there was no suspicion of fraud in the
first place. This is a huge financial burden on many families. More
importantly, however, the children are sometimes forced to spend months in an
institution, which stunts development and increases the challenges of bonding.
There are better alternatives. There are better ways to
detect fraud – successfully – without suspending civil liberties or shredding
the freedom upon which this country was founded. We are here to lobby our
government to implement better ways to process adoptions coming out of
Ethiopia.
These recommendations are pretty basic stuff. Presumption of
innocence, right to an attorney, discovery, transparency, accountability – we
are not asking for anything other than basic human rights. Please see the links to the right on this blog for ways you can help to stop corruption among the US Embassy in Ethiopian international adoptions. In order for us to bring change to this system of corruption each of us has to help. Your voice is important. Every family counts. The time is now. All hands on deck. All heads out of the sand.
