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.