Annihilation of Child Rights in Croatia’s Courts

A cautionary tale on the adoption industry, especially international adoptions

A Congolese scout scoured the countryside for children for a Croatian adoption agency

In 2023 a scandal rocked Croatia and its neighbouring countries: eight Croatian nationals, all public figures, were arrested in Zambia on child trafficking charges. A former employee of the Croatian intelligence services was revealed to have established a “charity” advising Croatian couples on the process of adopting children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In doing so, the couples were fleeced of a great deal of money.

This article is an introduction to the topic of illegal adoptions of children from Africa into the EU via Croatia. Since January 2023, Croatia has been in the Schengen area, meaning that once these children reach Croatia they can easily disperse across the EU since there are no border checks.

In 2023 a media investigation over 6 days in Jutarnji list, a major Croatian newspaper, laid bare the utter negligence of Croatian judges and illegal practices that led to the “laundering” of the trafficking of these children,. To date, more than 120 individuals have been found to have been trafficked into Croatia from DR Congo. The Croatian Government refuses to inform the public about the fate of these children, using as a smokescreen the privacy of the families involved. Thus, we do not know if these children are alive.

The Croatian Government claims that there is nothing illegal about these adoptions. It is interesting that the State Secretary for social policy, Margareta Mađerić, who appears in this TV programme announcing that everything was smoothed over by a Zambian judge, is the same woman who signed a letter to the author of this article dismissing her complaint about the blatant institutional trafficking of her British twins into Croatia. It is also worth noting the involvement of the department of foreign affairs, since these departments seem to play a crucial role in the international trafficking of children.

The owner of the “charity” arranging the adoptions, Adriana Sučić Roginić, had been reported by the Croatian Ministry of Social Welfare for running an illegal adoption agency, interestingly by Tanja Katkic Stanić, an official who would later moonlight as a mediator in this author’s child abduction case. A year later, SDP Minister Milanka Opacić, who is now known to be involved in a ring of powerful women in the family justice system, reported the same to the State Prosecutor. As a result of these reports, Sučić Roginić stood in a criminal trial in 2012, not on child trafficking charges but for defrauding the adoptive parents. A judge in the coastal city of Split acquitted her of these charges using unconvincing arguments. And the reports of criminal activity fell quiet.

Since then, the number of children trafficked into Croatia rocketed. So can we assume the same will happen again, since the Croatian Government insists there is nothing wrong with importing children on fraudulent documents, in procedures full of errors and with no respect for the rights of the child?

Where is the EU?

Where are the bodies of the EU? When scandals like this have broken before in Belgium and the Netherlands, there have been serious ramifications. In the case of Croatia, there are rumours that the authorities in Zambia were bribed to drop charges against the Croatians by the US Government. The USA has long backed a muscular profit-driven adoption lobby. This report by the charity Against Child Trafficking indicates that the EU has had its eyes wide shut on international child trafficking for a long time. This would explain why this author, and other families she is in touch with, have never been able to get a sensible response from the bodies of the European Union or the European Court of Human Rights to complaints about judicial child trafficking.

All of this impacts the author of this article, since her children were trafficked from the UK to Croatia due to abuse of power, procedural and legal violations in child abduction and custody cases in the very same Croatian courts at the heart of the Congo scandal, with the same Presidents of the Municipal Court in Zlatar butchering her cases and overseeing the Congo cases. It shows that there is absolutely no regard for the law in children’s cases, which renders the outcomes illegal. Her children are paying the price for this to this day, living unhappily in a state of false imprisonment.

Croatia is not alone in the practice of “child laundering”, yet the public has difficulty believing that the authorities could be quite so corrupt. But they are, because of the enormous amounts of easy money involved in the trade in children. This is just one modern incarnation of the slave trade.

Here is a summary of the violations of the law found in the adoption of Congolese children in Croatia.

Violation 1: Legal Adoptions Ignored DRC’s Ban on International Adoptions

Since 2017, the DRC has prohibited all international adoptions, meaning that no foreigner can legally adopt children from the country. Despite this ban, numerous adoption orders for Congolese children have been validated by Croatian courts. Authorities in Croatia have overlooked these restrictions, effectively legalizing adoptions that should not have been permitted in the first place. Shockingly, this has occurred with the complicity of Croatian judges, who have either failed or refused to properly verify the authenticity of adoption orders coming from the DRC .

Violation 2: No Checks on Legitimacy of Documents

Judges in Croatia did not attempt to authenticate the Congolese adoption judgments or verify that they were issued by legitimate courts. The Croatian judicial system failed to engage the necessary diplomatic and consular channels to ensure that these foreign documents were not fraudulent. It was revealed that the same court in Kinshasa purportedly issued multiple adoption orders on the same day at the same time—a physical impossibility that points to forgery .

Violation 3: Disregard for Children’s Rights and Identity

Perhaps the most egregious violation of child rights lies in the failure to protect the adopted children’s identities. Under both Croatian law and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted children have a right to know their biological origins. However, Croatian courts have routinely validated adoption orders without recording the names of the children’s biological parents, or even confirming whether the parents were alive.

Some documents also revealed name changes imposed by adoptive parents, effectively erasing the children’s pasts without any legal oversight. Courts arbitrarily ordered time limits on the storage of documents, in some cases meaning that adoptees would lose all hope of tracing their roots before they reached puberty. This contrasts with domestic adoptions, where files must be kept in perpetuity.

Violation 4: Manipulation of Court Jurisdiction and Schedules

In several cases, adoptive parents sidestepped unfavourable rulings by “shopping” for more lenient judges in courts which were out of their jurisdiction. Couples who were denied validation of Congolese adoption orders in one court simply travelled to another court where judges were more willing to approve their requests. In one example, a couple whose request was denied in Slavonski Brod quickly obtained approval from a judge in Sesvete just 48 hours later. This kind of forum shopping further highlights the disregard for standard legal procedures.

At the same time as these fast-tracked processes were happening, the author’s own children waited for 16 months in the same court for a decision in their child abduction case, which according to the regulations should be completed within 6 weeks. The same delays took place in the child custody case that followed. This shows that the courts manipulate the duration of proceedings to influence outcomes. They can find a hearing date when they want to.

Violation 5: Hasty and Flawed Legalisations

The investigation uncovered instances where judges approved international adoptions in a matter of minutes without conducting the required checks. Some hearings lasted as little as 10 minutes, during which time the fate of children’s lives was decided. In many cases, judges did not even ask for the necessary consent from the Croatian Ministry responsible for social welfare, as required by law. Decisions were often made without any justification or reference to the proper legal frameworks.

Violation 6: Copy-Paste Rulings and Preferential Assignment of Judges

Judges processed the adoptions in a mechanical, “copy-paste” fashion, with little concern for individual case details. Most shockingly, an investigation revealed that 62.5% of the adoption rulings in Zlatar were assigned to the same group of judges, often bypassing the system of random case assignment designed to ensure fairness and impartiality. One judge, for example, processed nine out of eleven adoptions outside the standard procedure, without random algorithmic assignment.

This is the same court where the author lost her British citizen children who were kidnapped by their Croatian father, a former intelligence services official and current senior Customs Administration official.

Systemic Failures and Cover-Up

The judicial misconduct extended beyond individual judges, revealing systemic issues within Croatia’s legal and governmental institutions. Investigations conducted by the Ministry of Justice and the Supreme Court failed to uncover any irregularities, even though glaring violations were obvious. Despite numerous reports, no judges have been held accountable, nor has there been any serious investigation into the systemic failures that allowed this scandal to unfold over more than a decade .

Conclusion: A Call for Accountability and Abolition

This scandal has exposed serious gaps in the Croatian adoption system, particularly concerning international adoptions. The lack of oversight, failure to adhere to both domestic and international laws, and disregard for children’s rights demand urgent attention and reform. Croatia’s government must take immediate steps to investigate the breaches of law, hold responsible parties accountable, and follow European countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden which may be abandoning the inter country adoption industry.

The international community, especially the European institutions and organisations dedicated to the protection of children’s rights, must also be vigilant in ensuring that such violations are never repeated. At the heart of this scandal are vulnerable children whose rights to identity, family, and protection have been trampled upon in favour of a process marred by profiteering, corruption, negligence, and gross legal misconduct.

It is also a cautionary tale for would-be adoptive parents, showing how easy it can be to be duped into fulfilling a desperate wish for a child only to find that they have brought into their lives a child who was kidnapped from a loving family.

Over the next few days we will publish more detailed summaries of this investigation by Jutarnji list as it exposed grave violations, including falsified adoption documents, lack of due diligence by Croatian courts, and widespread disregard for both Croatian and international laws protecting children’s welfare. These forms of malpractice occur from time to time in many countries, therefore it is vital to be vigilant to guard against this form of child trafficking.