Panama: still on the way to deinstitutionalisation and the fulfilment of the right to family and community life

We continued our technical cooperation with UNICEF Panama during September with a full agenda. Our technical team conducted training workshops in the city of Santiago de Veraguas and in Panama City, at the headquarters of the Ministries of Children, Youth and Family (SENNIAF) of those cities. We are also moving forward with the pilot program at Casa Hogar Soná.

We were lucky to have the participation of officials from SENNIAF and the Ministry of Social Development (MIDES). The workshops were conducted by Matilde Luna (Director of RELAF) and our legal consultant María Pilar Ramírez.

In the same vein, we conducted a workshop with NGOs from Panama on “Adoption, the Right to Identity and to be heard / Adoption, International Comparative Framework”, at the UNICEF offices in Panama City, Clayton. We met with significant NGOs knowledgeable in the subject, with the goal of further improving the local adoption policies, focusing on a comparative regional legal framework of good practices. We also discussed the improvement of the preparatory and post-adoption processes from the children’s psychological point of view and, of course, for their adoptive families.

With the aim of achieving deinstitutionalisation and the full exercise of the right to family and community life, we are still moving forward with our Pilot Plan for the girls at Casa Hogar Soná. In that sense, we documented some of their testimonies, part of their histories and of the reality they live every day. It was also an appropriate occasion to conduct a workshop on the mutual recognition of skills and virtues that girls have and how they can develop and use these qualities to assert their human rights as children and adolescents. Also, UNICEF Panama and RELAF’s technical team were received by the Director of MIDES in Veraguas, Professor Gloria Camaño, who has shown a strong commitment and support to our actions in Casa Hogar Soná.

As part of our agenda, we conducted a workshop and forum jointly with UNICEF Panamá, held at the Presidential Palace ("Palacios de las Garzas") with key players from the Panamanian child protection system. Authorities from SENNIAF, the Legislature, magistrates, representatives of the Colleges of Psychology, Law and Social Work and representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were present. At that meeting, we worked and talked about adoption in the country, as well as about comparative frameworks with other countries of the region.

RELAF and UNICEF Panama are both working tirelessly for the right to family and community life for all children in the country, Latin America, and the Caribbean.