Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty di­rec­tor Safiya Noel has is­sued a stern warn­ing to po­ten­tial par­ents and par­ents not to sell their child/chil­dren to des­per­ate cou­ples.

Noel is­sued the warn­ing along­side chair­man Han­iff Ben­jamin and adop­tion man­ag­er Meli­na Humphrey at a press con­fer­ence at its Port-of-Spain of­fice on Thurs­day, hours af­ter five peo­ple, in­clud­ing a Trinci­ty cou­ple, were charged with il­le­gal­ly adopt­ing a Venezue­lan in­fant in what po­lice are call­ing a his­toric case. This marked the first time any­one had been charged un­der the Adop­tion of Chil­dren Act 2000 Sec­tion 9:2

Po­lice say a sixth sus­pect is be­ing sought in the case in which a Venezue­lan woman is al­leg­ing she was co­erced by a group of in­di­vid­u­als to give up her child.

The au­thor­i­ty made it clear no oth­er en­ti­ty is au­tho­rised to en­gage in ar­rang­ing the adop­tion of a child.

Steer­ing clear of the court mat­ter, Noel said, “I just want to speak specif­i­cal­ly to par­ents, po­ten­tial par­ents who may have a child on the way or who may have al­ready had a child and does not know what to do with that child and may con­sid­er not car­ing for that child. Please con­tact the au­thor­i­ty.”

Noel said par­ents should al­so de­sist from mak­ing adop­tion arrange­ments in hos­pi­tals.

“We are ask­ing med­ical pro­fes­sion­als to con­tact the au­thor­i­ty. We will make a re­port to the Child Pro­tec­tion Unit, Counter Traf­fick­ing Unit or any oth­er arm of the po­lice that we need to ...to en­sure the law is up­held.”

She plead­ed with par­ents not to give up, aban­don or throw away their child/chil­dren, say­ing there are fam­i­lies who are will­ing to pro­vide a won­der­ful home for them.

“Do not at all ...there is no fi­nan­cial con­sid­er­a­tion for adop­tion, none what­so­ev­er. Any­one who is ask­ing you for mon­ey (TT or US dol­lars)...red flag... go to the po­lice or call the au­thor­i­ty,” she ad­vised.

Ben­jamin said the sit­u­a­tion be­fore them gives rise to a num­ber of things.

In go­ing for­ward, he said the au­thor­i­ty’s board will make rec­om­men­da­tions to At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris-Al-Raw­is in re­la­tion to some of the fines and penal­ties in the Adop­tion Act. Cur­rent­ly, per­sons found guilty of il­le­gal adop­tion are li­able on sum­ma­ry con­vic­tion to a fine of $10,000 or two years im­pris­on­ment.

“Be­cause we want peo­ple to un­der­stand that this is a se­ri­ous thing. We want peo­ple to un­der­stand that it is far-reach­ing and it can dam­age lives.”

Humphrey said the au­thor­i­ty has in ex­cess of 100 ap­pli­ca­tions from par­ents seek­ing adop­tions, while the num­ber of chil­dren who were put up for adop­tion was far less.

“We have more per­sons want­i­ng to adopt. We have more per­sons on our prospec­tive adop­tive list than chil­dren be­cause we don’t have a pool of chil­dren. Most per­sons would re­quest a ba­by and we don’t have the ba­bies to ser­vice the num­ber of per­sons,” Humphrey said.

In their three years of ex­is­tence, the au­thor­i­ty has done 24 opened and closed adop­tions.

Asked what steps the au­thor­i­ty has in­sti­tut­ed on par­ents who are strapped for cash and would en­gage in these in­for­mal arrange­ments, Ben­jamin said their man­date was the care and pro­tec­tion of all chil­dren re­gard­less which coun­try they come from.

Asked if the au­thor­i­ty had to deal with the ex­ploita­tion of un­doc­u­ment­ed chil­dren, Noel said yes.