MOSCOW, Feb. 22 -- A group of 7,000 American families with adopted Russian children appealed to President Vladimir Putin Tuesday to reverse recent legislative and bureaucratic rules that have dramatically slowed the adoption process.
The families also said some members of parliament have been fighting international adoptions for the last year, and they asked Putin to speak out against those legislators.
In an open letter, an informal coalition of U.S. adoption agencies asked Putin "to tell Russian politicians who obstruct international adoption that the well-being of children is an important priority for your administration, that you believe each child has a right to find a family and that international adoption is the best option for children who are not adopted by Russian families."
The letter, which was published in the newspaper Izvestia, was drafted and paid for by the coalition and written in consultation with the National Council for Adoption, according to Lee Allen, a spokesman for the council.
"We hope he will give it the attention it requires," Allen said of Putin. "We have every reason to believe that the care of these orphans is important to him."
Allen said his organization had also asked President Bush to raise the issue Thursday during meetings with Putin in Slovakia.
The Russian president welcomed the adoption last year of a 3-year-old Russian girl by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his wife.
Until recently, about 15,000 Russian children of an estimated 700,000 orphaned and abandoned children have been adopted each year, half by Russians and half by foreigners. Americans have adopted more than 5,000 children in Russia each year, according to the State Department, making them by far the largest group among foreign adoptive parents.
But the number of adoptions is currently about one-third the level of previous years, according to the State Department.
Americans adopt more children from Russia than from any other country except China, Allen said.
Adoption agencies said the slowdown in Russia is being caused by a new accreditation process that has not been implemented, leaving many agencies in a kind of legal limbo and leading the courts here to rule that the agencies have no standing. At the same time, new rules introduced by the parliament's Committee on Women, Family and Youth have lengthened the amount of time it takes to adopt a child.
The letter to Putin said the legislative changes were driven by hostility toward the idea of international adoption. Russia is "a dirty country that sells its children," one Communist Party deputy said last year.
"Rather than help the 99 percent of orphans who have no hope to be adopted either by Russian or foreign families, they create obstructions for the adoption of 1 percent of orphans," the letter said about some members of parliament.
