MOSCOW, March 15 (Itar-Tass) – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Friday he is convinced of the importance of promoting the practice of child adoptions in Russia but he is not sure, however, if the authorities should set up a specialized agency to monitor the sphere.
“It’s quite obvious we must improve the instruments of our activity in that sphere,” Putin said at a meeting with Pavel Astakhov, the presidential ombudsman for children’s rights.
“The question is whether or not we should set up any supplementary bureaucratic agencies for this purpose,” he said. “That’s what we should look at the problem. It’s important to discuss the issue both with representatives of the public at large and with experts.”
Astakhov told Putin, on his part, that the implementation of this proposal would bring more system into the activities of all the 19 federal organizations, which are involved in regulating the situation with child adoptions in one way or another.
“We might set up either a presidential council for the policies towards the family and children or an interdepartmental commission,” Astakhov said. “The problem is we’ve had an interdepartmental commission already and I chaired it personally for two years but then we came to a conclusion that a unified agency is needed all the same.”
“In the situation as it is today, it appears that the office of the Ombudsman substitutes for this work at present,” he said.
Astakhov admitted that it is really difficult to ponder the setting up of a federal agency for adoptions.
“The thing is all the European countries around us have created the ministries of this kind in the past five years,” he said. “We also have several regions in Russia that have set them up – Buryatia, Tyva and, much closer to Moscow, the Kaluga and Bryansk regions.”
“They /the specialized agencies for adoptions – Itar-Tass/ have been demonstrating fair performance over the past two or so years,” Astakhov said.