Tag Archives: Hague accreditation

Jayme Hansen Named to IAAME Board

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Jayme Hansen, who has a tremendous range of professional international work experience as well as the lived experience of being a Korean adoptee to the United States, was recently named to the Board of the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity. (IAAME).

According to Inter Country Adoption News:

“Congratulations to Jayme Hansen!! Jayme is our ICAV USA Director and has just been voted in as a Board member of the USA Accrediting Entity, IAAME for a 2 year term. This is the org in the USA who accredits all adoption agencies on behalf of the Dept of State who hold overall responsibility for intercountry adoption. We have been saying to the Dept of State for years now that Lived Experience needs to inform all policy, practice and legislation – so it’s awesome to see they have actively sought lived experience at this level in their key organisation!

Jayme comes in with a wealth of NGO experience and has sat on numerous NGO boards and has done volunteer work for 28 years. IAAME is designated as an Accrediting Entity (AE), under the authority of the Secretary, and as allowed by 22 CFR 96.7(a) to Accredit agencies and Approve persons to provide intercountry adoption services in the United States.

IAAME is a 501(c)(3) organization operated by staff with extensive experience in providing child welfare services, administering child welfare standards, contracting, licensing, monitoring, and both domestic and intercountry adoption services. More information can be found at: https://www.iaame.net/“

As best I know, Jayme Hansen is the first international adoptee to serve on the board of IAAME. I was not able to find a list of IAAME Board members. Jayme brings an enormous amount of experience, from his U.S. military service to his work as a chief financial officer in multiple countries. He also has extensive volunteer service, including with efforts to disseminate DNA tests to Korean adoptees. We wish him great success in his new position with IAAME.

I wrote recently about a new accrediting entity, the Center for Excellence in Adoption Services, being designated along with IAAME to accredit adoption agencies under The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. I realize that adoptee citizenship is not the precise bailiwick of accrediting entities, though adoption agencies surely have a substantive role in promoting citizenship for all international adoptees, and should be on the frontlines demanding that deported adoptees be allowed back into the U.S. I continue to believe that citizenship for all international adoptees to the United States should be paramount in any and all international adoption work.

US State Department Announces New Hague Convention Accrediting Entity

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Citizenship for all international adoptees should take precedence. That said, the US State Department today announced that the Center for Excellence in Adoption Services (CEAS) has been designated as an accrediting entity for purposes of The Hague Convention on Inter Country Adoption.

CEAS will join the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity (IAAME) as a Hague accreditor of Adoption Service Providers under The Hague Convention. IAAME was designated as an accrediting entity for another five years as of June 2, 2022. There are around 280 agencies currently accredited by IAAME. That number includes agencies that have multiple locations: one agency might have several offices in a state or in different states.

The CEAS website does not yet specify that they are an accredited entity under the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000. It does, though, list their current staff and Board of Directors, all of whom had an affiliation with the Council on Accreditation.

in 2006, COA was the first entity designated by the US State Department. They withdrew as an accrediting entity in 2017. The State Department’s announcement of COA’s decision is here.

The National Council for Adoption wrote about COA’s decision here, during a time when NCFA disagreed with the way that State was handling international adoption.

Much of the controversy then concerned how regulations were being implemented, with some advocates feeling the regulations were cumbersome and unnecessary, and other advocates arguing that the fraud and corruption in international adoption desperately needed better oversight. Many countries (Guatemala, Ethiopia, South Korea, China, and others) have decreased the numbers or completely stopped placing children for international adoption.

Numbers of international adoptions have declined substantially in recent years. While there were almost 23,000 children adopted internationally in 2004, there were just over 1600 in 2020.

International adoption needs a dramatic overhaul—that’s something of an understatement.

And sure, CEAS may well provide good accreditation services, and sure, those services are probably needed for adoption agencies seeking to place children internationally.

However:

Will this new entity be part of business as usual, without adult international adoptees or international birth parents consulted and respected for their expertise? Will the decision-makers and policy influencers involved in the placement of Black and brown children remain mostly white, especially white adoptive parents?

Will there be a focus on adoption without any lens of white saviorism?

Will there be emphasis on orphan prevention and family preservation first? Will there be respect for authenticity and for genuine efforts to make sure there is not any fraud? (European Adoption Consultants, whose staff has pled guilty to fraud and corruption, was Hague accredited. State announced their debarment in 2016.)

Will there be effort above and beyond the minimum to ensure that every child’s medical and family history is accurate, and, especially, that the child is truly an orphan? So many adult adoptees have found that was not the case for them: they have discovered they were not orphans at all, though that is what they and their adoptive parents had been told.

Will there be any follow-up for international birth parents post-adoption that is equivalent to what US adoptive parents can access?

Much more attention from everyone in the international adoption community should focus on CITIZENSHIP FOR ALL ADOPTEES and on BRINGING DEPORTED ADOPTEES HOME.

This should be the priority of energy and attention, by accrediting entities, organization officers, Congress, adoptive parents, prospective adoptive parents, and others, before the international placement of more children.

Adult adoptees are putting in great emotional labor, as well as time, money, and expertise, in working to get the Adoptee Citizenship Act passed. Other information is available here and here.

If you’re going to promote international adoption, do so only after all international adoptees to the United States have been granted citizenship. To do otherwise is hypocritical and insensitive at best.