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Diplomat says children's rights talks possible after Trump takes office

Trump will be sworn in as the 45th US president on Capitol Hill on January 20

© Valery Sharifulin/TASS

MOSCOW, January 11. /TASS/. Russia’s representatives may visit the United States to discuss the protection of Russian children’s rights shortly after Donald Trump takes office, the Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, Konstantin Dolgov, said on Wednesday.

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Moscow has no plans to give US citizens permission to adopt Russian children

"We hope that we will be able to pay a trip to the US in reasonable time after the new administration is formed," Dolgov said at the meeting of the interdepartmental working group on international issues of protecting children’s rights.

"I hope that in the foreseeable future - I won’t name the exact date, but at the earliest after the administration is formed - we will resume our official request to the US side on such a trip," he said.

Trump will be sworn in as the 45th US president on Capitol Hill on January 20.

Adoption law

The Barack Obama administration failed to ensure the removal of conditions that had led to a ban on the adoption of Russian children by US citizens, Dolgov said.

"This is a matter of our legislators, but from the viewpoint of the Foreign Ministry I can confirm that those conditions and serious failures in the work of US authorities that forced us to adopt the Dima Yakovlev Law remain now," he stressed.

"The US administration made nothing serious and significant to improve the situation in this field," he said.

The diplomat added that the attempts to establish contacts with the US side to learn about the fate of the adopted Russian children brought no results. "The law was fully justified and is justified," Dolgov stressed.

Russia’s lawmakers passed the so-called Dima Yakovlev law that took effect in January 2013 banning US citizens from adopting children in Russia. The legislation is named after a child from northwest Russia's Pskov region who died of heat stroke four months after being adopted by a US couple when his adoptive father left him in a parked car for nine hours.

The Dima Yakovlev Law is considered to be a response to the Magnitsky Act adopted by the US Congress in December 2012, placing sanctions on a number of Russian officials.

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