Copy of Summary from Draft ISS report for UNICEF on ICA inVietnam.Summary of Key ObservationsIntercountry adoptions from Vietnam are essentially demand driven.

Thus the availability of children who are “adoptable” abroad correspondsmore to the existence of foreign prospective adopters than to the actualneeds of the “abandoned” and orphaned children. As a result theoverwhelming majority of adopted children are under one year of age, theage-group most sought by prospective adopters. Since only a relativelysmall and ever-decreasing number of other “countries of origin” arecurrently making children of this age “adoptable” abroad, foreign actorshave proved willing to accept conditions put in place by Vietnam for processing these adoptions. There is also considerable pressure fromabroad for Vietnam to continue as a “source” of very young children.

The circumstances under which babies become “adoptable” areinvariably unclear and disturbing.

Declarations of so-called“abandonment” are intriguingly frequent, with unexplained peaks andtroughs. Procedures for verifying the child’s status and, inter alia, for ensuring free and informed consent to adoption are inadequate andinconsistent. Decision making on the availability of a child for intercountry adoption as opposed to domestic adoption (including returnto the biological family) seems to take no account of the subsidiary natureof adoption abroad, with little or no effort being made to establish thechild’s real need for the latter or to identify in-country care opportunities.

The intercountry adoption system is grounded in a remarkablyunhealthy relationship between agencies and specific residentialfacilities.

It involves compulsory and sizeable financial contributions byagencies in the form of “humanitarian aid” to facilities that theythemselves have identified as potential “partners in ICA. The question of “aid” generally seems to be given far more importance than ensuring thatICA is resorted to as an exceptional measure on a case-by-case basis.Agencies compete with each other to secure children and tend to expectthat children will be “indicated” to them for ICA processing according tothe amount of humanitarian aid provided. Agencies are subject to little or no monitoring, and neither they nor the residential facilities they work with have any incentive to address or notify problems, since the way thesystem presently functions is to advantage of both.