An older couple from Lage Zwaluwe went on a family visit in the Philippines in 2015 when they decided to adopt a baby. Once back in the Netherlands, the GGD rang the bell because of presumably forged papers. The entire adoption procedure turned out to be illegal. Suspect Klaas B. (82) and Maribeth B. (61) were allowed to explain to the court on Wednesday how this could happen.
The girl who was adopted is now 10 years old and has been living with another foster family in the Netherlands for years. They too were present this Wednesday in the full court in Breda. “Her identity development is seriously damaged,” they said. “You removed her five days after her birth and kept crucial information about her hidden. That was a conscious choice with devastating consequences for our child.”
In March 2016, a bell will ring at the GGD during a request for a children’s vaccination. The papers of the relevant Filipino baby of one year are wrong. The municipality of Drimmelen is called in and they report the married couple because of false papers.
Interrogation
During an interrogation at the police, the couple admits that they are not the biological parents of the baby and that they have obtained the baby without adoption documents via via in the Philippines, the country where Maribeth B. was born. They also declare that it was important that their names are on the false birth certificate, so that the child could later not find out who her biological parents are.
On Wednesday it appears that Maribeth B., who, according to the public prosecutor, is ‘limited intelligent’, received the child through her sisters from the biological mother. Whether she was voluntarily ceded remains unclear. “It’s done without my knowledge and permission,” says her husband. He would have heard it shortly after the birth of the baby in 2015 via a phone call from his wife from the Philippines. “I was stunned about that and I did not agree. We are too old for a child and we were not eligible for a Dutch adoption procedure. Then I immediately thought: this could not have happened in a legal way.”
Nevertheless, Klaas B. flew to the Philippines a few months later in the summer, in his own words ‘because the amount he had to pay to the sisters for the child’ became too high. Once there he found the child with the Maribeth B. family under ‘miserable circumstances’. “She was in a room of three by three without a bath and bedroom. She had to leave there.”
False passport
He arranges a passport at the Dutch embassy for the child to bring her to the Netherlands. Miraculously he succeeds and they take the child with them, to a completely unknown country for her. Away from her biological mother.
That is where the public prosecutor blames them very much. She starts her requisitoir after a short stop because Maribeth B. cannot control her emotions: “It is not clear whether her biological mother has voluntarily handed over her to Mrs. B .. Furthermore, it is certainly not up to the suspects to determine for a child from another country or should go there or not. The right to know where you come from is a universal right.”
There is 25,000 Filipino Pesos, converted around 400 euros for the child, and 5000 for the birth certificate, about 80 euros, “the officer knows. The married couple is suspected of human smuggling, among other things. The public prosecutor demands a year and a half in prison.
“Marie will always be a foreigner in her own country,” says the mother of the family where she now lives in tears. “She has nightmares, fear of failure and a low self -image. This could all have been prevented if this had not taken place. The suspects did nothing to make a gesture to the child.”
The judge will rule on this case on Wednesday 25 June.