‘Surprise’ at inaction on illegal adoptions

A UN body said last year it was "surprised" that the issue of illegal adoptions and vaccine trials in mother and baby homes had not been dealt with.

In an email to the Adoption Rights Alliance last September, Jean Claude Vignoli, programme director of the Universal Periodic Review, a mechanism of the UN Human Rights Council, praised the group’s submission to Ireland’s fourth periodic report to the UN Committee on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“I took a look at your report, and I am quite surprised no state did raise your issues; your report was of high quality, very well drafted,” said Mr Vignoli. “Did you lobby the states in order to encourage them to make recommendations according to adoptions issues?”

The report, which was also sent to the director of Human Rights and United Nations at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Colin Wrafter, in May 2012, cited a total of 14 articles of the covenant which the State was in breach of.

The ARA submission stated that Irish adopted people continue to be “denied the right to know their families of origin, their own original name, their natural mother’s name, their place of birth, the circumstances which led to their adoption, and their early care and medical treatment”.

It pointed out that Ireland was in breach of Article 2.3 of the covenant “in relation to the unauthorised and illegal vaccine trials that took place in mother-and-baby homes” and was further in breach by “colluding in the arbitrary incarceration of women and girls in mother-and-baby homes and by failing to provide an effective remedy to survivors”.

ARA also said Ireland was further in breach of the covenant by denying Irish people trafficked to the US a right to their nationality.

“The 2000-plus Irish children trafficked by various church-run adoption agencies to the United States, Canada, England, and other locations in contravention of Irish adoption law from the 1930s to the 1970s have been denied their Irish nationality, in fact some have no knowledge at all that they were born Irish citizens,” said the submission.

ARA had been calling for a statutory inquiry like the one announced by children’s minister Charlie Flanagan this week for over a decade.

A 131-page dossier calling for a statutory inquiry into the homes, vaccine trials, and forced and illegal adoptions arranged in such institutions was presented to former children’s minister Frances Fitzgerald in 2011.