What Nepal’s Adoption Laws Did to the Children Who Were Taken Away

Ms Devasha Pant

Maya was nine when a family in Barcelona adopted her. She kept only fragments of her life in Nepal: her mother, her elder sister, the village she’d lived in, and the day her mother and sister disappeared and left her and her younger siblings behind. In June 2017, she travelled back with a researcher and two friends, carrying a few photographs and a street name. A twenty-hour bus ride from Kathmandu brought her to Birendranagar, in western Nepal. A shopkeeper recognised her brother-in-law in one of the photographs and pointed them to a village.

Her sister didn’t recognise her at first. Then she did. The next day Maya met her mother, Tulsi, who cried and kept repeating that her children had gone, gaye, gaye.

Her mother’s account was this. After her husband died, the villagers judged her harshly and wanted the family to leave. They left, meaning to send for the children later. She had entrusted Maya and her siblings to relatives for what she thought would be a short time. When she came back, the children had been sent away without her knowledge.

Maya’s story belongs to a much larger one. Nepal’s adoption system sent thousands of children abroad, and the laws meant to protect them kept failing. One account puts the number of Nepali children adopted abroad between the 1980s and 2000s at over 5,000, mostly to the United States, France and Spain. Government figures cited in one study count 2,234 intercountry adoptions between 1993 and 2008. Through the 1990s, adoption was regulated by the Children’s Act of 1991, and Bal Mandir was authorised to charge $300 per child. Terms and Conditions issued in 2000 opened intercountry adoption to child centres other than Bal Mandir, and by 2008, 47 centres were handling adoptions.

In 2007, the government suspended intercountry adoption after reports of irregularities. A two-year study by UNICEF and Terre des Hommes found cases of child abduction and of babies taken for adoption without their parents’ consent. Nepal issued new Terms and Conditions in 2008, and adoptions resumed in January 2009. That April, Nepal signed the Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention. Hague Conference experts then visited and concluded the 2008 rules were not adequate. They found that documents were being falsified to declare children adoptable and that this had continued under the new rules.

In August 2010, the United States suspended processing new adoption cases for children claimed to have been abandoned, because the supporting documents were unreliable. Other receiving countries stopped as well. Nepal halted adoptions again after the 2015 earthquakes. The US State Department now says Nepal has not completed an intercountry adoption since 2019 and has no procedures in place to process one.

The system stopped, but the people it had moved did not disappear. Between 2010 and 2019, Nepal’s ministry recorded 64 children sent abroad for adoption to ten Western countries. Denmark alone reported receiving 20 children in that period, while Nepal had paperwork for two.

Many of those adopted earlier are adults now. Ashmita, 26, didn’t come back mainly to find a family. She wanted to learn what the orphanage and the government knew about her. Her adoption agency answered slowly and incompletely. The orphanage resisted more, and its director made veiled threats. She found the name of the person who had brought her there, but that person had disappeared. Then a police report suggested she was born in a different municipality from the one in her adoption papers, and police began looking into it. She was told by a government official that the records were sealed deliberately and not meant to be reopened. An NGO representative told her it was better for everyone if the past stayed in the past.

Nepali law treats adoption as a break. Adopted children’s birth parents are no longer their legal parents, so their ties to the country are effectively erased on paper. Most adoptees were declared orphans during the process, even when their parents were alive, which cut their legal link to Nepal and removed documents that could later prove their origin. Many hold only English translations of their records because the originals weren’t preserved, so ward offices have to reconstruct birth certificates.

Hari Prasad Sacré went to the Nepali embassy in Belgium for a Non-Resident Nepali card, which gives people of Nepali descent residency and property rights. A staff member told him he wasn’t eligible because Sacré is not a Nepali name. His birth parents were alive, and he was in touch with them, but the law no longer recognised them as his parents. He got the card only after his father obtained a statement from a local government body in Kaski confirming that he had been adopted and was of Nepali origin. His case was the first of its kind at that embassy, and it worked because his father was alive and willing to speak for him. Many adoptees don’t have that.

Nepal signed the Hague Convention in 2009 and has never ratified it. The Convention is designed to protect children from being trafficked, sold, or taken from families who never intended to give them up. It requires that intercountry adoption be a last resort after support for the child’s own family and domestic options, that birth families give free and informed consent without payment, and that each country set up a central authority and accredited agencies to oversee every case and preserve records so adoptees can later trace their origins.

Signing is only a statement of intent. Ratifying is what makes a country legally bound and obliges it to build these safeguards. Nepal’s ambassador signed the Convention on 28 April 2009, yet the binding framework has never followed, leaving the children who were sent abroad, and the families who lost them, without the protections and accountability the treaty promises. Ratification would not undo past cases, since the Convention is not retroactive, but it would create the permanent safeguards that were missing when those children left.

By Devasha Pant

(She is a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, majoring in Human Rights and Politics and also an author and political analyst).