Italy ready to facilitate contacts for adopted children

Italy’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that it was willing to help Rwandan children adopted after the 1994 genocide make contact with relatives, the Associated Press reported. Rwanda has demanded the return of 41 children currently adopted in Italy, but an Italian court ruled in favour of the adoptions and said the children should remain in Italy. Italy’s Foreign Ministry Undersecretary, Rino Serri, said that Italy was willing to work with Rwanda to establish “contact between the children’s new Italian families and their families in Rwanda”. He stressed that any contact would however depend on the “wishes of the children themselves”. The children are now aged between six and 10. He noted that he had discussed that issue with Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame last week.

The mayor of Castenedolo in Italy, where the children are living with adoptive parents, had stated that the proposal to return the children to their homes was “absolutely irresponsible”. “You can’t transfer children who have become accustomed to life in a western country to a country that has nothing,” the mayor was quoted as saying. President Kagame told a news conference in Kigali last week that he could not understand why parents and relatives “can be denied the right to these children because Rwanda is poor. Poverty is not a crime”. “This represents the attitudes of contempt that have characterised relations between the north and the south,” he said.