The head of the Uruguayan Institute for Children and Adolescents (INAU), the nationalist Pablo Abdala, was in our department.
Asked about the moment that the institute is going through, the hierarch expressed that “INAU is a very important institution in the life of the country, not only because of its magnitude from the institutional point of view but, especially, because of the mission it fulfills, which is the protection and promotion of childhood and adolescence”, he said.
“In the life of our country as in any country and in any society, there is a lot at stake in relation to that. Because not only is the fate of those children and adolescents who require the support of the State defined there, in their capacity as subjects of rights, but depending on the success or failure that we have from the State in that task, we are conditioning no more nor less than the fate of the society in which we are living and in which we will live in the future, “he said.
“The current regulations are appropriate. We do not need more laws or new laws, imperatively”
Asked if the current regulations are updated or obsolete, Abdala replied that “the current regulations are appropriate. We do not need more laws or new laws, urgently. Without prejudice to the fact that legislation is always perfectible. And I even go one step further. We ourselves have formed a commission of experts that is acting at this time and that includes professors such as Beatriz Ramos, an expert in Family Law, Gabriel Valentín, a Procedural Lawyer, ”he asserted.
“It is a Commission of Experts on Family Law, which has been operating for several months. For this year, that Commission is preparing a proposal for the comprehensive adjustment of the Children’s Code. It is not about urgent reforms, but about improving, perfecting the legislation. The Child’s Code has been built by patches. The version that we currently have comes from the year 2004 but in the successive legislatures, I was a legislator, many adjustments were made”, he maintained.
Regarding the controversy that arose over the interference of the Law of Urgent Consideration (LUC) in the increase in adoptions, Abdala clarified that “there were two contested articles that luckily were confirmed that have to do with an institutional conception of the INAU and which were the articles referring to the government of Education. The INAU based on these articles became part of the Coordinating Commission for Education, the Departmental Commissions for Education, and other areas such as the Advisory Council of the National Institute for Educational Evaluation (Ineed) ”, he stated.
“Going to the adoption articles, the facts, not the opinions, have shown that the changes were sensible, they were prudent. The government, instead of rethinking the current model in terms of adoptions, chose, intelligently in my opinion, to introduce three adjustments, which I classified as surgical and which I believe have led to an improvement: the unification of judicial processes, of separation from the biological family and full adoption, the maximum period of 18 months to assess the families that want to adopt and the possibility that family justice in certain situations when the full integration of a child into the family is notorious can decree the adoption. And I think that in all cases we have achieved the harmonic integration of these modifications and with the correlate of the changes that we introduced in the management because it is clear that the laws by themselves do not produce the changes, they establish things and then they have to be fulfilled. And to comply with those changes of the LUC in the INAU we restructured the area of adoptions, we decentralized the management, everything was excessively concentrated in Montevideo”, he asserted.
“Any family, anywhere in the country, to adopt a minor had to do all the paperwork in the capital. Now, the families of the interior, carry out the registration in their department, carry out the workshops and interviews with the pairs in their own regions, we incorporate human resources, well, all this result of regulatory and management changes generated notoriously favorable consequences. In 2021 we had the highest number of adoptions since records were kept 20 years ago, there were 125 integrations and most important of all, because this result could have been circumstantial, the other indicators seem to indicate the beginning of a trend. We have a very robust Single Registry of Applicants (RUA), today there are 180 families that are ready to adopt. I believe that we have achieved greater efficiency and what must be achieved in this matter is the balance between time and guarantees. Time is very important because the passage of time conspires against adoptions, as children grow older the possibilities of adoption become increasingly complex, as from the age of 5 it is difficult for children to go out for adoption. This improvement in time has not gone against the guarantees and the system has been very balanced”, sentenced INAU President Pablo Abdala.
