A bill has been introduced to the State Duma to ban the adoption of children from Russia by citizens of foreign countries where transgender transition is permitted. The document has been published in the database of the lower house of parliament.
The deputies propose to ban the adoption of children from Russia or the guardianship of citizens of Australia, Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, Spain, Italy, Canada, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Estonia and other countries, explained one of the authors of the amendments, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.
“It is extremely important to exclude possible dangers in the form of gender reassignment that adopted children in these countries may face,” Volodin wrote. Other authors of the bill include Vasily Piskarev, Anna Kuznetsova, Nina Ostanina, Irina Yarovaya, Dmitry Gusev, Pyotr Tolstoy, Anatoly Vyborny and Irina Filatova.
The deputies believe that “a number of states are making attempts to purposefully erode traditional values, distort world history, revise views on the role and place of Russia in it, and incite interethnic and interfaith conflicts.”
In their opinion, “the activities of various organizations” created by the United States, other “unfriendly” countries, “transnational corporations and foreign non-profit organizations” pose a particular threat to traditional values.
“And the most dangerous thing in this situation is that the state can control the absence of gender reassignment among potential adoptive parents only at the time of adoption on the territory of the Russian Federation. And, consequently, a foreign citizen who has adopted a child who is a citizen of Russia, after returning to the territory of the state of his citizenship, can already change the gender, but the worst thing is that he can change the gender of the adopted child by starting the use, for example, of hormone replacement therapy, which is unacceptable! says the explanatory note.
“The bill is aimed at implementing state policy in order to exclude any possibility of adoption of Russian children by representatives of LGBT communities. I would like to note that by introducing a ban on adoption by foreign citizens from the above states, we are, in fact, introducing a ban on the adoption of children by citizens of NATO countries,” the deputies concluded.
In August 2022, a bill banning adoption and guardianship for citizens of “unfriendly countries” was already submitted to the State Duma for consideration; at that time, LGBTQ people were not mentioned in it. The amendments were not supported by the Presidential Council for the Codification and Improvement of Civil Legislation.
The Council’s conclusion stated that in 2004, foreign citizens adopted 7,013 children from Russia, and in 2022 — only 57. Of these, 43 children were adopted by Italian citizens, five children each by citizens of Germany and France, one child by citizens of Finland, and another two are citizens of CIS countries. Then the authors of the expert report paid special attention to Ukrainian children taken to Russia — the experts came to the conclusion that the bill violates their rights.
Over the entire last year, Russian authorities allowed foreigners to adopt only six children from Russia, writes “Important Stories” with reference to the data bank of the Ministry of Education.
In 2012, Russia adopted «Dima Yakovlev's law», which prohibits US citizens from adopting Russian children. The law was a response to sanctions against Russian government officials who, according to American senators, were involved in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
“If you want to defeat the people, educate their children.” How a ban on adoption for “unfriendly countries” can affect Ukrainian children taken to Russia
A new bill banning the adoption of children by foreigners was announced at the end of June by Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Pyotr Tolstoy at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum. At the same time, he said that deputies were working on an initiative “to recognize the right to life and health protection before the birth of a child.” At the same forum, Deputy Minister of Justice Vsevolod Vukolov reported on the “active preparation” of a bill banning the “childfree ideology.”
In July 2023, Putin signed a law that banned operations related to trans transition and changing the gender marker in documents. At the end of the same year, the Supreme Court declared the non-existent “international LGBT movement” to be “extremist.”