The Dutch state acted unlawfully in the adoption of Sri Lankan born Dilani Butink in 1992. The court in The Hague decided on this on Tuesday, ANP news agency reported. Butink was the first adopted Dutch person to take the government to court, because she believes it was obliged to do more to prevent fraudulent adoptions. The court first rejected her complaint because of the statute of limitations of the case, but now Butink has been proved right on appeal.
When Butink visited her native country about seven years ago, she found out that the document number on her birth papers belonged to another child. The adoption procedure in 1992 was therefore shadowy, she discovered. According to the procedure, a boy would first be adopted, but when that turned out to be gone, Butink was arranged as a replacement adopted child through an intermediary. Because the procedure was not correct, it is not possible for Butink to determine who her biological parents are and under what circumstances she was given up.
Butink, now thirty, demanded that the government acknowledge her guilt, compensate her and set up a DNA database for adopted children from Sri Lanka. This should make it easier to trace biological parents. In any case, she now receives recognition from the court and compensation — the amount of which is not yet known. The court called the earlier argument of limitation “unacceptable”.
In Sri Lanka, there were many shady adoption practices in the 1980s and 1990s. Opposite research program Zembla The Sri Lankan government admitted in 2017 that in the 1980s there were ‘baby farms’ in the country where women gave birth to children for the purpose of meeting the demand for adopted children. In some cases, children were also taken away from their parents, even though they had not been given up for adoption.