Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged at a meeting with the deputy prime ministers on Monday that such a resounding public response, which the adoption procedure of orphans stirred up, does not subside yet. The premier also instructed the government to develop the mechanisms “to facilitate the children’s adoption procedures” within quite tough deadlines.
The Russian government has set quite tough deadlines to draft a document to speed up the children’s adoption procedure, the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily reported. However, Medvedev replied that the proposals should be drafted in the way that they will be accomplishable and realistic. The Russian prime minister instructed Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets to arrange the work for the fulfilment of the presidential decree. He noted to her that additional measures of material support, which are seeking for the adoption of children in the families, should be taken. Meanwhile, the prime minister instructed to introduce in the State Duma a bill, which increased the monthly social pension to disabled children and heavily disabled people from the early childhood to 8,704 roubles from January 1, 2013.
A total of 654,000 underage orphans live in Russia now, including 128,000 orphans need family adoptions, the Kommersant daily cited Olga Golodets as saying. 105,000 of them are the inmates of the orphanages, the rest of them study at the vocational educational establishments and live in the dormitories. Meanwhile, “18,000 families were stated today as the families, which are ready to adopt a child, and these families are passing different stages of adoption process,” the deputy prime minister said.
However, the group of US senators demanded from the Russian Embassy in Washington to explain how the enactment of the anti-Magnitsky law will affect the fate of the children, whose potential parents had already been granted a permit for child adoption, the newspaper noted. The Kremlin assured that all children, which are about to be adopted in the US foster families under the court verdicts, will be adopted in the United States. On Friday, January 11, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov stated that the Russian authorities will consider attentively each case of terminating the adoption process of children by the foster parents. He noted that if the legal child adoption process is not finalized, “the full ban on adoptions of Russian children by the US foster parents will take effect,” but the children, “who are about to be adopted under the court verdicts, will go to their foster parents.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the federal law on the measures of impact on people, who are involved in the violations of the fundamental human rights and freedoms, the human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens on December 28, 2012, the RBC daily recalled. The document bans the adoptions of Russian children by the US citizens from January 1, 2013.