Sweden should end international adoptions, government commission says
STOCKHOLM, June 2 (Reuters) - Sweden should phase out international adoptions, a government-appointed commission said on Monday, after an inquiry prompted by concerns that children had been taken from their biological parents without permission.
"Today, it has become even clearer that for decades, children and parents have been affected and harmed in the context of international adoption," Social Services Minister Camilla Waltersson Gronvall said.
The commission identified irregularities including illegal adoptions and other unethical practices, the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs said in a statement.
Sweden launched the probe in 2021 amid growing concerns that adopted children may have been taken from their biological parents illegally.
There are nearly 60,000 international adoptees in Sweden, the commission said in its report.
The report recommended an official apology to adopted people and their families as well as financial aid to help those who have been adopted to travel to their country of origin.
The Netherlands said in December it would phase out international adoptions over the next six years, while Switzerland said in January it also plans to end the practice, amid concerns of abuse.
Waltersson Gronvall said the government would now analyse the commission's findings and proposals.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Abramovich billions may never reach Ukraine – and ‘Government knew it' from day one
The row centres on the interpretation of a 'deed of undertaking' between the Government and Abramovich in which he agreed for the money to be committed to charity 'for the purposes of helping victims of the war in Ukraine'. When putting Chelsea up for sale, Abramovich publicly stated that he wanted the proceeds to be used 'for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine' – including those from his native Russia, something successive governments have refused to countenance. An official involved in the negotiations in 2022, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Telegraph Sport: 'Day one, we were concerned. We went eyes open with the fact that this was a possibility. But there genuinely wasn't an alternative.' The official said the danger of Abramovich blocking the release of the Ukraine fund had taken a back seat to fears he 'would let Chelsea go to the wall' if a deal was not struck to sell the club before the end of that season, or that he would try to 'legally get the money back himself' if sanctions against him were lifted. 'The decision was to put it in a place where we knew he couldn't get at it, and then there was a principle that this charity would be formed and that it would spend the money wisely,' the official added. 'That it's dragged on to this point is just as much a testament to the fact that the Government hasn't invested financial pressure, resources or political capital in dealing with what was, from day one, very clearly going to be a problem.' Three-year delay 'incomprehensible' Indeed, Reeves and Lammy have taken until this week to threaten legal action, something Telegraph Sport has been told the previous Conservative government had ruled out. That is despite a report by a House of Lords committee in January last year finding it 'incomprehensible' the issue had not been resolved and urging ministers 'to use all available legal levers to solve this impasse rapidly, so that Ukraine can receive much-needed, promised, and long overdue relief'. The report was published by the European Affairs Committee, chaired by cross-bench peer Lord Ricketts, a former permanent secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, British ambassador to France and national security adviser. He told Telegraph Sport it had taken too long for the Government to act upon the report's recommendations and acknowledged an acrimonious legal battle could delay things much further when it comes to accessing a fund likely to have accrued more than a hundred million pounds in interest. 'It's getting ridiculous that this delay should be dragging on and on,' Ricketts said. 'I'm not a lawyer and I can't explain exactly what the Government are going to do, but I think it's now really urgent to get this sorted. And I think 'incomprehensible' is still a pretty good word to describe why, three years later, we're still waiting for the money to go to the people who really need it in Ukraine.' Concerns over the delay had been raised even earlier, including by Mike Penrose, the former chief executive of Unicef UK, heading the independent foundation set up to administer the fund. He was joined two years ago by Oxfam, Save the Children, Kyiv-based charities and UK families hosting Ukrainian refugees in calling for then prime minister Rishi Sunak to urgently break the deadlock. That was after the European Union, like the Government, ruled the money could only be spent within Ukraine's borders, an edict the charities urged Sunak to ignore. Labour peer Lord Foulkes also wrote to then chancellor Jeremy Hunt in September 2023 over the 'unacceptable delay' in releasing the funds, adding in his letter: 'The only barrier, as far as I can tell, seems to be bureaucracy, and it strikes me as ridiculous that we should let a matter of paperwork confound these efforts, when our Ukrainian allies overcome incredible adversity on a daily basis.' Foulkes told Telegraph Sport: 'The trouble is we've been playing by the rules that the Russians never acknowledge, never play by, and we have been trying to get some agreement on it. 'That was always likely to fail – and certainly take a long time. I'm glad that, at last, they're now taking action and I think it's the right thing to do, and they should press ahead with it as quickly and as forcibly as possible.' Seizing of Russian assets 'politically explosive' Telegraph Sport has been told the previous government ruled out legal action after concluding there were too many downsides, including the risk investors could shun the UK. Various sources with knowledge of negotiations with lawyers for Abramovich have branded the ongoing row as a 'nightmare issue', describing the seizing of Russian assets as 'politically explosive'. Explaining the difference between freezing and seizing assets, a source said: 'Seizing assets is a whole new ball game. There's a sizeable chunk that is frozen in Britain that are Russian-state assets. There are huge numbers of countries and lots and lots of lawyers who would explain to you that if you even try taking it and just seizing it and say that money is now ours, you are facing intense pressure.' The source said that could include 'lobbying' from other countries which invest in the UK who might say: 'OK then, we're pulling out billions of billions from your economy now.' Bart De Wever, the Belgian prime minister, also warned in March that confiscating almost €200 billion (£168 billion) of frozen Russian assets would be 'an act of war' and would carry 'systemic risks to the entire financial world system'. Telegraph Sport has also been told the last government was split on whether to compromise on Abramovich's demands, with Andrew Mitchell said by one source to have discussed ways ministers could 'cut a deal' with the oligarch when he was at the Foreign Office. Explaining the power Abramovich currently held over the frozen Chelsea sale fund, a source said: 'He can't access the money. He can't spend the money, but he can stop the trust spending it and, at the moment, he's always hidden behind, 'No, the terms that I agreed to the sale are not quite the same as the terms that the British Government are now insisting on'.' Telegraph Sport has approached a representative for Abramovich for comment on the Government's legal threat against him. A book entitled Sanctioned is being released next week in which he is expected to be quoted about the sale of Chelsea and the sanctions imposed on him.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The spirit of Liz Truss, ridiculous but relentless, stalks British politics
We need to talk about Liz Truss, although there are reasons not to bother. The prime minister who failed faster than any previous holder of the office has much to say about her dismal record, but nothing insightful. She cuts a pitiful spectacle padding out the schedule at rightwing conferences, chasing attention and relevance with an addict's fervour. Last week, Truss was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, sharing the big lesson she learned in government. It was that British institutions have been captured by a leftist doctrine and that they 'hate western civilisation'. She couldn't possibly counter this threat from No 10 because supposedly the real power was wielded by a well-financed 'globalist network', operating through such engines of anti-democratic subterfuge as the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization. Truss believes these nefarious forces authored her downfall. They taught her that gradual reform is impossible. Only a 'Trump-style revolution' will do. This is her routine spiel. Indeed, it was the theme of her paranoid, self-pitying memoir-cum-manifesto, Ten Years to Save the West, published last year. Her disquisitions on the topic go unreported in her home country. She made more headlines last week from a two-month-old cameo appearance in a promotional video for a whiskey brand launched by a bare-knuckle fighter with a conviction for violent assault. (How that endorsement advances the restoration of western civilisation was unclear.) But a thorough summary of the CPAC speech was dutifully published by Tass, Russia's main state news agency. Their report led with the claim that 'globalists are trying to control the political process across Europe'. It is standard practice for Russian news channels to weave selective quotes from western politicians into tendentious propaganda, except there is no need to take Truss's words out of context. She narrates the west's slide into godless decadence without an edit. She provides the frothy conspiracy theories that Kremlin-friendly bots amplify on social media, and hallmarks them with the authority of a former prime minister. A British audience knows the caveats to that status: Truss was ousted within 50 days; a lettuce had more staying power. But the title stands. She really did rise to the top, and not through some freak system malfunction. She played and won the Westminster game by its rules. She had multiple ministerial briefs under three prime ministers. She persuaded a clear majority of members of Britain's venerable establishment party to make her their leader. Colleagues who suspected (or knew from experience) that Truss was unhinged stayed silent or endorsed her candidacy once her momentum looked unstoppable. Client journalists who had benefited from her notorious indiscretion, and looked forward to ever greater intimacy with power, colluded in the fiction of her fitness to govern. Even now, when the former prime minister's name is a byword for economic incompetence, Conservatives are euphemistic in contrition. When invited to apologise on behalf of her party for the disastrous mini-budget of September 2022, Kemi Badenoch has said only that she wants to 'draw a line' under the episode. The obstacle is not a residue of loyalty but a continuity of belief. The dogmatic engine of Trussonomics – that tax cuts always pay for themselves by stimulating enterprise to generate growth – is still an axiom of mainstream Conservatism. So is Trussite suspicion of the public sector as a redoubt of bureaucratic socialism. Badenoch, like Truss, backs a Maga-style revolution to rip chunks out of the government apparatus. She has spoken enthusiastically about Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, adding that Doge methods are not 'radical enough' for the bloated British state. The fact that Musk's purgative rampage through Washington has failed to produce the advertised cost savings doesn't deter imitators. Nigel Farage has announced the creation of a mercenary Doge 'unit' to hunt down waste in the councils that Reform UK won in last month's local elections. This exercise serves a double function. First, Farage will scapegoat any local officials whose duties can be branded under the rubric of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Second, he will overstate the expense of such schemes, generating improbable nationwide savings to justify tax cuts in a Reform manifesto. Trussonomics will be rehabilitated and rearmed with imported US culture war rhetoric. Farage was once a fan of Truss's economic policy. He praised her fiscal farrago as 'the best Conservative budget since 1986'. The year harked back to the heyday of Thatcherism. These days Farage has to be careful about fetishising the Iron Lady. His party's electoral base lives in Labour's former heartlands, so he is a convert to the cause of industrial nationalisation. He now shakes his magic money tree to the left as well as the right. The Tories lack such ideological elasticity. In any case, Badenoch doesn't seem interested in economics. She is more animated by the crusade for free speech. This, like the demonisation of DEI, is a fixation borrowed from the US right. When JD Vance declared that European democracy was more imperilled by censorious liberals than by Russian military aggression, Badenoch admired the US vice-president's deployment of 'truth bombs'. Here, too, she is on the same page as Truss, who told last week's CPAC audience that free-thinking dissidents from Keir Starmer's Britain find refuge in Viktor Orbán's Hungary. (Orbán is Europe's foremost admirer of Vladimir Putin. He has suffocated independent media and political opposition.) It is hard to know how much of this derangement is conviction and how much is cupidity. There is money to be earned bad-mouthing Britain on the ultra-nationalist lecture circuit, but it is also easy to self-radicalise in that milieu. It is also hard to know how receptive a UK audience is to US conservative manias. Much of the UK right dwells in a US-coded online hallucination of Britain where criminal hordes of migrants have turned city centres into no-go areas and liberal thought police harass law-abiding white Christians. The danger is not that millions of voters will recognise the bleak dystopia as a factual representation of their country, but that it resonates as an allegory of national decline. It is not the complaint that Britain is in bad shape – dilapidation and economic strife are self-evident – but the cultivation of despair by projecting hard problems through a facile, conspiratorial lens. It is the insinuation that existing democratic institutions are not merely failing to make life better but maliciously orchestrating misery. This is the nihilistic cynicism that vaporises trust, corrodes civic culture and makes simple, authoritarian solutions attractive. It is music to Vladimir Putin's ears and grist to his digital disinformation mills. Perhaps we should be grateful to Liz Truss for playing the archetype of unwitting accomplice to tyranny – the 'useful idiot' of cold war parlance – so ineptly. She contaminates any cause she touches. That is why the British right shuns her. But social ostracism isn't ideological repudiation. The current Tory and Reform leaders are embarrassed by association with Truss, not because they despise what she says but because she looks ridiculous. Her offence was not the grift, but its exposure in ways that might discredit more skilful practitioners. She is not too extreme, only artless in applying the camouflage. She is the crumpled, discarded packaging from a product that, rewrapped, could be delivered once again to Downing Street. Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist One year of Labour, with Pippa Crerar, Rafael Behr and more On 9 July, join Pippa Crerar, Raf Behr, Frances O'Grady and Salma Shah as they look back at one year of the Labour government and plans for the next four years
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Julie Etchingham ends Garrick Club application after drawn-out process
Julie Etchingham has withdrawn her candidacy to join the Garrick Club, uncomfortable with the protracted process of being vetted by the London club's membership of 1,500 men. The broadcast journalist said she would not comment on her decision, but she is understood to have been uneasy at the level of hostility displayed by men opposed to the admission of women during a candidacy lunch at the club, when members have the opportunity to question prospective members. One member said he understood that with 'hardly any women being elected, it is very uncomfortable to walk into a room full of men scrutinising (and ogling) you'. Only three women have been admitted in the year since members decided to drop the club's men-only rule last May, 193 years after the club was founded. The comedian Matt Lucas was one of six men elected last month alongside one woman, Celia Imrie, who joins fellow actors Judi Dench and Siân Phillips, named as members last year. Several women from the first batch of female nominees for membership have expressed frustration at the club's 'half-hearted' steps towards admitting women. After decades of internal wrangling over the issue, 60% of members voted last May to confirm that women could be admitted to the club. But none of the seven women nominated as prospective candidates last year, all of whom occupy senior roles in journalism, law or academia, have yet been voted in as members. One woman whose candidacy is being considered by the club described the vote to admit women as a cynical public relations gambit, designed to allow the club to continue functioning quietly as essentially a men-only club. She said she found the vetting process absurd. 'We're all being made to feel we need to beg to join; most of us don't give a toss whether we join or not and think they should be making every effort to persuade us,' she said, asking not to be named to avoid alienating her sponsors at the club. She said it was clear that men who opposed women's membership were continuing to fight against the swift admission of women. 'It's frankly ridiculous and embarrassing. What are they scared of?' The actor Juliet Stevenson said she had heard nothing further from the club since she received a phone call from a member early in 2024 asking her if she would like to be nominated. She was uncertain about whether her candidacy had been dropped. 'I was asked if my name could be cited as a potential candidate and I agreed, but since then I've heard nothing more,' she said. 'I haven't set foot in the place. It wouldn't surprise me if they've decided they don't want a troublemaker like me in there.' One recent visitor to the club said the vote to admit women had had no impact on the atmosphere there, with just two women in a dining room full of approximately 50 men. A cohort of men who remain opposed to the rule change have set up a WhatsApp group named Status Quo where they continue to protest against the admission of women. The classicist Mary Beard, the former home secretary Amber Rudd, the Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman and the Labour peer Ayesha Hazarika were among the first nominees to join the club, along with Stevenson, Margaret Casely-Hayford, who was chair of Shakespeare's Globe and was chancellor of Coventry University until last year, and Elizabeth Gloster, a former appeal court judge. None of them have yet been approved for membership. Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion Another female prospective candidate said she understood that there was a 'dead man's shoes' element to the process of becoming a member (new members can only be appointed when old members die) but she hoped that the club would soon vote in some female lawyers, to balance the high concentration of senior barristers, judges and solicitors at the club. The club has consistently said it would not fast-track female members, stressing that women may have to wait three or four years for approval. 'It would be a helpful change if they brought in some female members of the legal profession; it would demonstrate the keenness of members to modernise themselves,' she said. A string of high-profile names resigned from the Garrick last year after the Guardian published a long list of senior figures from the civil service, politics, the arts and the judiciary who were members of a club that had repeatedly blocked the admission of women since the 1960s. Listed alongside the king were the then deputy prime minister, dozens of members of the House of Lords and 10 MPs, as well as heads of influential thinktanks, law firms and private equity companies, academics, senior journalists, the head of the Royal Opera House and the head of the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The head of the MI6, Richard Moore, and the then head of the civil service resigned from the club after deciding that membership was incompatible with their organisations' commitment to improving diversity. Several judges also left the club. The Garrick club did not respond to a request for comment.
