New twist in Asia's grim baby trade

Linda Mottram

Last Updated: Mon, 25 May 2009 20:55:00 +1000

Baby-smugglers have hit on a new angle in business - trading in pregnant women and using them to carry the item for sale, says a senior Australian law official.

Australia's chief federal magistrate, John Pascoe, says demand from the industrialised world to adopt very young babies is driving the new twist in people smuggling, particularly in Asia.

Mr Pascoe has just presented a paper on the issue to a LawAsia conference in Singapore, which was looking at children and the law.

He told Radio Australia's Connect Asia program that among the measures needed to fight the insidious trade should be a new system of children's rights.

Packed in foam

Until recently, says the magistrate, babies have been smuggled in more dangerous ways, such as in 2003 case when eight infants were found in a boat off Indonesia, packed in styrofoam fish boxes.

The boxes had been punctured to enable them to breathe, he says, "and put very crudely, this is seen by traffickers as not a particularly good way of moving children because there are health consequences.

"It is seen as both safer for the child and safer in terms of detection for them to move the pregnant mother across the national boundary."

Mr Pascoe notes that trafficking generally is very much a hidden crime, "but . . . there are fortunately an increasing number of arrests in this area, so we believe that (the incidence of this method) is increasing and that the numbers are probably in the thousands rather than in tens or hundreds".

Adoption process

The law officer says there is significant demand from the west for children for adoption and most of the newborns involved "end up in some sort of illegal adoption process.

"There's huge demand from first world countries for very young children for adoption purposes."

Asia Pacific countries should be urged to become signatories "to the various conventions" that protect the rights of the child. "That is not universal across the region," he says.

At the Singapore conference, Mr Pascoe urged a system that gives a child rights which crystallise the moment it is born, and including a right "to know its nationality, to know who its parents are and generally to be properly cared for".

He says the region also needs to increase border protection, "so that when somebody moves across a national boundary with a child that was not on their passport, for example . . . that questions are asked and that officials don't turn a blind eye".

He believes many western parents paying for adoption "would be horrified if they knew . . . that the child had been stolen, as (has) sometimes occurred, or that the mother actually had no idea what was really happening to her child".