Cambodia’s National Assembly approved the law regulating foreign adoption on Friday, Oct 23, 2009, while the two opposition parties’ lawmakers skipped the session in the celebration of the 18th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement.

According to the law, it aims at ensuring that Cambodian children adopted by foreign parents, grow up in a family environment, a happy environment, with love and understanding in order to develop fully.

Foreigner is able to adopt a child aged younger than 8 years, except in the cases of special needs children, who must be younger than 18 or older children adopted along with their younger siblings.

The children adopted by foreigner must be living in an orphanage, under the care of the Social Affairs Ministry, or have poor or disabled parents.

The Phnom Penh Post quoted Kek Pung, President of Licadho, as saying that she strongly supported the adoption law as a measure against child trafficking but called on the relevant authorities to ensure the new law fulfills its aims.

“The adoption issue is very important because we do not want to see our Khmer children trafficked,” she said. “When this law is issued, we must enforce it all together for the higher interests of our children.”

Under the law, adoptive parents must age between 30 to 45 years old.

Ith Sam Heng, the Social Affairs Minister said that a maximum will be set of 150 or 200 children adopted each year, and he added that the government will enact preventative measures including the creation of an agency to monitor adoptions and children’s backgrounds, and setting a cap on adoption fee by adopting parents.

Adoptive parents must pay about $250 for the legal process to the adoption authority. And the parents will also be responsible for orphanage donations and adoption fees, neither of which have been set.

The Minister said that the adoption period is only 284 days from beginning to the end, adding than there is no opportunity to extort money from adopters, reported the Cambodia Daily.

“Sometimes adoptions can be dangerous for children when the law has not been respected properly,” Chan Soveth, a program officer at the rights group Adhoc, was quoted by the Post as saying that

The law is a move to clean up the country’s much-criticized foreign adoption industry, which has long been associated with institutionalized corruption and reports of baby buying from poor parents to provide children for overseas adoptions. As a result, the US cut off Cambodian adoptions, as did the UK in 2004, while France implemented a temporary ban between 2003 and 2006. Australians are also forbidden from adopting, as the two countries have never signed an agreement on adoption, according to the Cambodia Daily.