Doctors And Nurses on trial over alleged Vietnam baby selling ring

A baby-selling ring made up of doctors, nurses and welfare workers has gone on trial in northern Vietnam accused of selling more than 250 children for adoption. The 16 people on trial are accused of falsifying papers for adoption in a case that has raised fears of international human trafficking. The defendants are said to have made $550 (£338) each. They face up to 16 years in jail. Among those on trial are two directors of social welfare centres in northern Nam Dinh province, the south east Asian country’s Thanh Nien newspaper reported. Doctors, nurses from local clinics and several local officials are also on trial, it said.

The accused allegedly put together false documents for children, officially declaring them abandoned. This made them eligible for adoption and allowed foreigners to adopt 266 children between 2005 and 2008, according to reports in Vietnamese newspapers. The two key suspects were arrested in July last year, reported Agence France Presse news agency. That was three months after the US embassy in Hanoi said that baby selling was endemic in Vietnam's adoption system.

The US blocked a two-way adoption agreement it had made with the country soon after that report was published. The US embassy’s investigation in April last year found that some American adoption agencies had paid 10,000-dollar ‘donations’ per child to orphanages after officials had forged birth certificates and wrongly identified the infants as abandoned. The embassy’s report said that Vietnam had failed to police its adoption system, allowing corruption, fraud and baby selling to flourish. It described brokers scouring villages for babies, hospitals selling the infants of mothers who could not pay their bills, and a grandmother giving away her grandchild without telling the child's mother. In some cases, the babies’ natural parents had been cheated into giving up their babies, while other babies had been taken from illegal centres that paid pregnant women to give up their newborns, the investigation found. Most children sent for overseas adoption from the two Vietnamese health care centres, a disabled children's home and a social protection centre, ended up in France, Italy and the United States, said Vu Duc Long, head of the Vietnamese Justice Ministry's International Adoptions Department.

Vietnam and the United States, one of the country's largest recipients of children for adoption, had restarted adoptions in 2006, three years after the agreement was pulled because of similar concerns.The trial is scheduled to last until next Monday.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children