Urgent Adoption Prayer

My dear friends and family,

We call upon you once again for pray in the Guatemalan adoption process.

We asked for pray for PGN(Solictor General's office) to re open earlier in Janaury and it did. We asked for pray for the new Central Authority to be established with a process to register the grandfathered cases and it was this week.

Now, with urgency, we ask that you pray for the Central Authority to fullfill the law and register the outstanding adoption cases by 2-12 which is the deadline imposed by the US Government and Unicef. Thousands of children are at risk of losing their families who are ready to offer them love and support.

If you have the patience, please read the article below. If God leads you, please contact your government representatives and make them aware of this issue by Monday, 2-11(Maria's birthday)! If you feel compelled to do more, please send to your friends and families to ask for further pray.

As always, we thank you for your love and your prayers.

Sue, David, Zara and Maria(waiting to come to her forever home)

February 09, 2008
REGISTRATION OF ADOPTIONS AT THE CNA: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

The director appointed by the Supreme Court, Rudy Amilcar Soto Ovalle, and the new appointed directors, Marilys Barrientos de Estrada and Elizabeth Hernandez de Larios, barely three working days before the registration time is up, set up a system to register again the cases, that can only be described as the best way to not register them. A half page announcement in Prensa Libre and five clerks to field all the work, was all the preparation made by the CNA to do it. Today, there were about eighty people waiting in line to present their registration forms, but from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. the five clerks admitting the forms were able to admit only
those presented by five people. During the afternoon, somebody of the CNA distributed numbers among those waiting in line, to allow them to present documents during the weekend. At the rate of five people per day, it will take a lot more than the remaining four days to accomplish such task.

The registration is as follows: the clerks review each line of each form and compare the copy presented earlier to the former CNA with its original, and carefully check if there is something missing, line by line. Any blank that was not filled out is cause to reject the form. According to CNA, things as the name of the attending doctor or midwife at the child delivery is very important, and the lack of information about that detail is a reason to object the presentation of the form.

The explanation to the registration process can be found in the arguments of the CNA, expressed to the Amparo Court, to support the need of the four page registration form, which are the following:

1) The lawyers are used to fill out forms in the adoption process, like the ones they do for the PGN and for the US embassy, so why do they argue about filling out another form, and it is a well known
fact, and therefore does not need proof, and the media offers constant information about it, that many children in adoption processes have been separated violently from their mothers, kidnapped and traded as any commercial goods, in open violation of their human rights, established in the Constitution, the laws and
the international conventions ratified by Guatemala, such as the Convention for the Rights of the Child and the Hague Convention.

2) It is obvious that before giving the constancia of registration, the CNA must verify, in coordination with the PGN, as required by Article 57 of the Adoptions Law, all those aspects inherent to the
process of adoption to be sure that the best interest of the child is the most important consideration in their situation.

3) The information required in the forms is neither private nor confidential, since the Adoptions Law is a public policy law which is not in the field of the Private Law, but of the Public Law, because it deals with human beings that are not in the human commerce and therefore cannot be traded or sold as if they were
merchandise, because the State is obligated to guarantee them their life, their personal safety and their integrity.

4.) To support what the lawyers who filed the amparo claim, would be to deny the effect and legal force of article 57 of the Adoptions Law, which is a transitory norm, that applies specifically to the in process adoptions, and not to those that will be done according to the new law.

We have no doubt that the CNA is seriously confused. One thing is registration of adoptions in process and a very different one is the registration of the different forms of child care, of children who are not being adopted or whose adoptions are not registered with the CNA.

Article 57 of the Adoptions Law states:
Regularization. Within the following thirty days after this law becomes effective, the Central Authority in coordination with the PGN will verify the situation of the children subject to the present law, who are under the care of persons, foster families and private institutions, to start the process of registration, authorization and supervision established in this law, as well as to start the judicial processes of protection of the children.

The whole and only purpose of the grandfather clause established in Article 56, is precisely to remove the adoptions in process from the scope of the Adoptions Law, and it would not make sense to be able
to continue doing the adoption according to the old rules, if the children would be under the dispositions of the new law. Definitely, the misinterpretation by the CNA of article 57, is the source of the problem created by the CNA who is mistakenly trying to mix the registration of adoptions in process (article 56) established to
remove the notarial processes from the dispositions of the Adoptions Law, as well as the children being adopted in those processes, with Article 57 that establishes the registration of the different forms
of child care of children who are not being adopted in the notarial way, and who sadly for them, would fall under the so called protection of that legal nightmare called Adoptions Law.

In view of the impossibility of the CNA to register all adoptions in process within the next four days, we urge you to start calling friends, relatives and politicians, and especially those in the US DOS who pushed so hard to get this law passed and put into effect without any planning or preparation, to raise their awareness that
the CNA is defeating the grandfather clause, by conditioning the registration of the cases in process, to their misinterpretation of article 57 of the Adoption Law. Help us to get all adoptions registered with a sensible, logic system. That is all we ask.