Eleven convicted in adoption case

An Egyptian court convicts 11 people of forgery and human trafficking for their involvement in a high-profile illegal adoption case.

CAIRO // An Egyptian court convicted 11 people, including two US citizens, of forgery and human trafficking yesterday for their involvement in a high-profile illegal adoption case. Miram Ragab, Gamil Gadala and Ashraf Hassan Mustafa were sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of 100,000 Egyptian pounds (Dh67,000) for helping three American couples illegally adopt Egyptian infants.

Two of the couples were given the same fine as well as two years in prison for forging identity documents for the children in an attempt to take them back to the United States. One of the three couples was convicted in absentia because they have already returned to the United States. Except for them, all those convicted have been held in detention since their arrest late last year and will be eligible for a reduction in their sentencing based on time-served.

Iris Botros, 40, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian, and her husband Louis Andros, a Greek-American restaurateur, travelled to Egypt in October 2008 on a tip from a friend-of-a-friend, Gadala, who said that a Coptic Christian orphanage had newborn children available. Shortly after their arrival in Cairo, Botros and Andros met Ragab, a Coptic nun who works for a small charity organisation called Bait Tobia in the Cairo neighbourhood of Shobra.

According to police reports, Botros paid 26,000 Egyptian pounds for two children, whom the couple named Alexander and Victoria. Because adoption is effectively illegal in Egypt, Ragab arranged for a doctor, Mustafa, to create fake birth certificates for the two newborns - documents that made the children out to be Botros's own recently born twins. But when Botros went to the US Embassy in Cairo in November 2008 to apply for visas for the children, consular officials became suspicious and called the police. The following month, the same American consular official reported one of Botros's co-defendants, Susan Hagelof, for the same crime, according to police reports.

Hagelof, an American who had been living with her Egyptian husband in Egypt since 2003, had "adopted" a child from a different Coptic Christian children's welfare organisation. A third couple among the 11 defendants, Josephine al Qis Matta and Atif Rashdy Hana, were also implicated in a separate illegal adoption scheme in 2008. That couple, who, similar to their co-defendants, were reported to Egyptian police by an official with the US Embassy, managed to leave Egypt before police could detain them. All four of the children are now living at the Dar Al Orman Association, a shelter for orphans in Giza, a suburb of Cairo. The case, with its implications of a child-selling conspiracy, caused a sensation in the Egyptian media when it broke in late 2008. The story came shortly after Egypt's parliament passed a comprehensive new child rights law in June 2008 that placed harsher penalties on human trafficking and child abuse. Ragab and some of her fellow defendants are among the first to be charged under the law's stricter human trafficking code. But whereas government law enforcement officials accused the defendants of trafficking in children, the defendants and their supporters said the case reveals profound flaws in Egyptian family law, which forbids adoption among Muslims and makes it very difficult for Christians to adopt. Sharia, or Islamic law, expressly forbids conventional adoption as it is known in western societies. Since Article 2 of the Egyptian constitution states that "the principles of the Islamic Sharia are the principle source of Egyptian legislation", the question of legalising adoption does not even figure in Egypt's political discourse. Instead, Muslims are allowed to sponsor children through a system called kafala - a sort of foster sponsorship that precludes naming the child after his or her adopted parents. While family law in Egypt contains separate statutes for Muslims and Christians, Egyptian Christians' minority status makes adoption difficult, if not impossible, said Peter al Naggar, a lawyer for Egypt's Coptic Christian Church. The differences between the Christian and Islamic statutes exist, for the most part, on paper, Mr al Naggar said. [e-mail]