Russia to tighten adoption rules, lower limit on adopted kids for each family – minister

“We are drafting into the parliament a motion that brings down the number of children that one family can adopt or take under guardianship,” Olga Vasilieva said on Thursday, according to TASS.

The existing maximum number of minors that an adoptive family can have, including their biological children, is eight. “A family should not become a kindergarten or an orphanage,” she said.

“We will introduce much tougher requirements for adoptive parents’ selection. The requirements for people who seek the honorable title of parent will get tougher. Also, we will rewrite the rules of psychological testing for people who want to become adoptive parents, also making them stricter,” the minister said.

Vasilieva also told reporters that the proposal was brought forward as a result of an increase in the number of tragic incidents involving adopted kids. “All tragic incidents in new adoptive families that took place this year bring us to a sad conclusion: the selection of future adoptive parents had been organized very recklessly,” she said.

The minister proceeded to give some gruesome examples to illustrate her point, citing an event that took place last January in Russia’s Smolensk Region, where a man who had initially been refused the right to adopt was subsequently approved, before going on to rape and murder a seven-year-old girl.

In the same interview, Vasilieva said that her ministry did not plan to lift the existing ban on adoptions for HIV-positive people.

The head of the State Duma Committee for Family Women and Children, MP Tatyana Pletneva (Communist Party), said she understood Vasilieva’s motives but warned that excessive restrictions could lead to unwanted consequences.

“She is worried and I understand this. I also think that she is perfectly right because today people adopt children only to get financial aid and children in such families do not always feel well and cozy. There are a lot of complaints,” the lawmaker told the Moscow Calling news agency on Thursday.

“But on the other hand, if we tighten the requirements too much, this may force us to open new orphanages or allow adoptions to foreign nations, which I would prefer not to happen. She is right when she describes what is going on today though, and we need to change something about it,” Pletneva said.

In early 2013, Russia introduced a ban on adoptions by US citizens or by proxy of US-registered organizations. The sponsors of this law explained it by reference to several cases of Russian children being abused by their American adoptive parents, noting that the US justice system had ordered disproportionately mild punishment in such cases, while Russian diplomats were prevented from monitoring the investigation. Senior Russian officials also backed the ban, saying that it would increase the number of domestic adoptions. Indeed, this is what happened in subsequent years.

The Russian ban was later extended to all countries that allow same-sex marriages.

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