You're reading: Russian court allows some US adoptions to go ahead

MOSCOW - A number of American couples whose adoptions of Russian children were in the final stages of approval before Moscow imposed a ban breathed a sigh of relief on Tuesday when a court said their adoptions could go ahead.

The precise number that will be allowed is unclear.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said last month that six
adoptions that had been approved by Russian courts would go
through, while another 46 that were still under way would not.

Rebecca and Brian Preece from Idaho, who hope to fly home
with 4-year-old Gabriel, a boy with Downs Syndrome, said
Tuesday’s ruling was “the news that our judge has been waiting
for”.

“Now hopefully, hopefully, hopefully she will issue the
decree,” Rebecca Preece told Reuters. “This is the most
emotionally difficult thing I have had to go through.”

The couple have already had to postpone their return flights
as their agonising wait for a decree that will allow them to
apply for Gabriel’s passport, exit visa and adoption certificate
has dragged on for 10 days.

Along with dozens of others, their adoption request had been
in limbo since President Vladimir Putin signed the ban, which
took effect on Jan. 1.

The ban is part of a package of legislation that responds to
a U.S. law known as the Magnitsky Act, which excludes Russians
from the United States who are suspected of involvement in the
death in custody of anti-graft lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009
or of other human rights violations.

Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that, in cases where the
adoptions had been approved by courts before the new year, the
children should be handed over to their adoptive parents, it
said on its website.

Russia had about 110,000 orphans living in state
institutions in 2011. They are eligible for foreign adoption
only after repeated attempts to find them a home in Russia.

Americans have adopted more than 60,000 Russian children
since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, according to the
U.S. State Department. From 2000 to 2010, the figure was more
than 1,000 every year, with a high of nearly 6,000 in 2004.

In approving the ban, Russian lawmakers pointed to abuse by
adoptive parents, including the deaths of 19 Russian-born
children adopted by Americans in the past decade. They say U.S.
courts have been failed to prosecute these abuses properly.

Critics of the measure say it will deprive thousands of
children, many of them ill or disabled, of their best hope of
escaping Russia’s overburdened state institutions