An independent voice for ethical adoption
Fear over Mali’s missing children
From BBC News:
Adama Coulibaly has got his daughter back now, but he is still determined to find out what happened to her and how she went missing from the streets of Mali’s capital, Bamako.
According to Mr Coulibaly, his four-year-old daughter Adjaratou was abducted from in front of his house in September last year.
Four months later, in January this year, Adjaratou was spotted by a friend. She was with a German couple in central Bamako.
The Germans had legally adopted Adjaratou and were due to fly with her to Germany in a couple of days…
Many of the families accuse the police of not taking the cases of missing children seriously. The police deny this and say they investigate fully every case reported to them.
Senior Malian lawyer Lamissa Coulibaly, however, says, he does not have much confidence in the police investigations to try to find a child’s family. He says the police lack the means to carry out these investigations thoroughly.
Mr Coulibaly also says there are also serious flaws in the adoption procedures in Mali.
“The children are declared as abandoned, but in fact they are not really abandoned. Sometimes you have some children who are declared abandoned and the natural parents can be found somewhere in the country.”
Mr Coulibaly says the parties involved in organising an adoption in Mali are often more keen to get all the papers finalised than to check whether the real parents can actually be found.
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