Europe’s shame: children for sale

THOUSANDS of children are being sold into slavery in Romania by an EU policy that has forced the country to close hundreds of orphanages and slapped a blanket ban on international adoptions.

Cut off from the chance to give up children they can no longer afford to feed, desperate parents are left with no option but to sell their children as cheap labour to work on Romanian farms or to Mafia gangs where they are beaten and maimed and forced to beg on the streets.

A British freelance journalist Michael Leidig who tried to buy children over the weekend, claims he was offered seven in the space of a few hours in a poor suburb of Bucharest. Once bought, the children are imprisoned and forced to work from dawn to dusk by their modern-day slave masters.

The EU has demanded laws banning such buying and selling of children are enforced, but since they were introduced several years ago only two people have been prosecuted, receiving fines of just €29.

The investigation found two teenagers, aged 13 and 15, who had been left disabled after accidents while working as slaves.

And in a poor district of Bucharest, Leidig says he was offered children for as little as €100, with no checks on who he was or what the fate of the children would be.

Romanian officials had pledged to act more than a month ago when local media first highlighted the trade, but the buying and selling of children is still a flourishing trade.

George Roman at Save the Children also demanded the government act against parents who sold their children into slavery, saying: "Poverty is not a good reason to give your child away and people who are doing this should suffer legal consequences."

But Maria Ciornei, who sold her two sons to a pig farmer for €117, said it was better for them to be in slavery than starving.

She said: "I can not feed them, we get 43 cent a day from selling firewood we gather illegally from the local forest. It is not enough for my husband and myself, never mind for our children.

"We never got the money we were promised, and the farmer did beat the boys even though he promised to look after them but what can I do. I can not feed them, the orphanages have been closed because of EU pressure and the EU will not allow international adoptions. There is no other option if they are not to starve."

The authorities in Giurgiu County where the two boys were sold to the pig farmer have said that they have already identified 100 more slave children, aged between 11 and 17.

But they denied that the practice of 'renting' children by the farmers could be described as trade slavery or forced labour. Even the local mayor uses a child to work for him and admitted he was "shocked" when told it was illegal.

However, only this month as Maria was selling her two sons to the pig farmer Romania was singled out for praise by the EU for progress in the area of child protection.

The report from Brussels proclaimed: "Romania continues to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and has made good progress especially as regards anti-discrimination, child protection and national minorities."

The report ignored the modern day slave trade and such ongoing examples as the joint Romanian German investigation into the case of a Romanian boy murdered because he refused to beg.

The child, named only as Florin, was beaten to death and his body burned and dumped in the outskirts of Munich in 1997 by a suspected Romanian Mafia gang.

Police also recently uncovered a child-smuggling gang which had 'rented' as many as 50 children and used them as beggars in Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland.

They were tortured by the gangs while working for them and police are investigating cases where children were maimed to make them beg more effectively.

Maria said deals like hers with the pig farmer were common practice, and that while they regretted their actions they still had no other choice if their children were to avoid starvation.

The family home in the village of Cepleneta near Iasi has a mud floor, the only furniture is a bad and a broken TV that serves as a table.

They have no kitchen table or chairs, and Maria said: "We worked 30 years for the local agricultural co-operative, but we were told we did not work long enough to get a pension. We had no choice, and it is normal for most people here."

Child labour has a long tradition in Romania where poor families with many children in rural areas have traditionally sent members to help childless or wealthier neighbours in exchange for either money, food or clothes.

But this practice has been exploited out of control by rampant poverty, and the forced closure of hundreds of orphanages by the EU without at the same time introducing a safety net for families who really can not afford to feed themselves and banning wealthy foreigners who want to offer Romanian infants a home.

An appeals court in Romania recently overturned a government ban on international adoptions following an appeal lodged by a non-governmental organisation, but the government has pledged to keep it in place anyway so as not to spoil the chances of accession to the EU in 2007.

The EU warned Romania that its position as a prospective EU member might be re-examined if authorities failed to address what the EU called a child-care "crisis."

But the ban was introduced without offering alternatives for parents who claimed they could not feed their children.