As part of the government’s advocacy for protecting and
upholding the rights of every child, the Department of Education (DepEd) and
the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) teamed up to raise
awareness on legal adoption of children.
Legal na Ampon Ako: Anak na Totoo brought together DepEd school
officials, teachers, child-caring partners, and adoption agencies in a forum to
bring focus on the processes required of adoption.
Adoption is recognized as a tool to protect and uphold the rights
of a child as mandated by United Nations Children's Emergency Fund’s (UNICEF)
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
“Adopted children may be very vulnerable at some point in their
lives, so it is important for schools to offer them a caring environment where
they will feel safe, accepted, loved, and not discriminated against,” DepEd
Undersecretary for Partnerships and External Linkages Mario A. Deriquito said.
Speaking about the CRC’s guiding principles and the rights of a
child to survival and development, protection, and participation, Association
of Child-Caring Agencies President (ACCAP) Atty. Gwendolyn Pimentel-Gana called
for immediate attention to the needs of children.
Pimentel-Gana added that children need protection not only
because they are entitled to the same human rights as adults, but also because
their dependence on adults cause their opinions and needs to be ignored or
overlooked as trivial.
Rosalie D. Dagulo, OIC-Assistant Director of DSWD’s Protective
Services Bureau, reiterated the social, administrative, and legal processes
required in adopting a child, starting with the issuance of a DSWD
Certification Declaring a Child Legally Available for Adoption (CDCLAA).
The CDCLAA is a certificate that is issued after a thorough
process of ensuring that an abandoned (foundlings included), surrendered, or
neglected child is no longer reinstatable to his or her biological family. Only
after this would the process of legal adoption—which includes application of
interested parents, preparation of home study report, screening of
applications, matching or family selection, pre-placement and placement of
child, supervised trial custody, finalization of adoption, and issuance of
adoption documents—commence.
Intercountry Adoption Board (IAB) Executive Director Atty.
Bernadette B. Abejo emphasized the need to be cautious of usual illegal
adoption cases like “simulation of birth” (or tampering of the civil registry
to indicate the adopting parents’ names on the birth certificate, thus doing
away with the legal obligations of adopting), which may also lead to child
trafficking.
“But there is so much hope for these children (on the streets),”
Abejo said, mentioning how the IAB’s precise process of matching potential
adoptive parents from different countries with qualified children has changed
the lives of Filipino adoptees.
Chaired by DSWD, other organizing committee members for this
adoption consciousness effort are child caring/placement agencies such as
Norfil Foundation Inc., CRIBS Foundation, and Kaisahang Buhay Foundation Inc.,
ACCAP, and the local government units (LGUs). (DepEd)
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