Adoption in Namibia and the Child Care and Protection Act

When it comes to the topic of inter-country adoption, controversy exists across the world.
In Namibia, the adoption of children born to Namibian citizens by non-Namibian citizens was prohibited up until 2004 when a court case deemed this prohibition (originally established by the Children's Act of 1960) to be unconstitutional. In this case, called the Detmol Case, the applicants were German citizens ad lawful permanent residents of Namibia who had applied to adopt a child who they had already been fostering for years, they were found suitable to be adoptive parents and the biological mother of the child consented to the adoption, but their citizenship became an issue.

On a general level, Namibia is party to the Convention of the Rights of the Child and also the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Both of these international agreements position inter-country adoption as an alternative means of providing care for the child in question, only if the child cannot be cared for in the country from which they originate - the idea being that inter-country adoption is a measure of last resort.

As of 2009, the Namibian government was in the process of proposing a new Child Care and Protection Act to replace the outdated Children's Act, a process which was being supported by UNICEF. The focus is on preventing abuses in the field of adoption, and the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption (which Namibia was on the path to ratify) is an excellent resource regarding the provision of mechanisms to minimize issues of stateless-ness and the potential problem of so-called "baby-buying" where foreign would-be-parents desperate to adopt pay massive sums of money to "baby brokers" who source children from them. This essentially constitutes a form of child trafficking and must be avoided.

Sources:
https://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=58300&page=archive-read

- Cecilia A.