Child Laundering

The practice of obscuring or falsifying a child's true origin and family history within an intercountry adoption process, including fabricating a claim that a child was abandoned or orphaned when the child was in fact stolen, purchased from or coerced away from their birth family, or obtained through fraud, in order to make the child appear legally eligible for adoption and to conceal the true circumstances from adoptive parents and adoption authorities. It has been documented by researchers, investigative journalists, and in some cases prosecuted by national authorities in a number of countries with a history of high intercountry adoption volume, including Guatemala, Cambodia and Ethiopia, prompting stricter international safeguards under the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.