AN UNPRECEDENTED WORKING TABLE IN VENEZUELA

By José Gregorio Fernández for RELAF’s newsletter

Moved by the evidence revealing the unfairness of institutionalisation and the lack of restoration of the right of a great number of children to family and community life, Venezuela President Hugo Chávez has called his own administration to put an end to this dramatic situation and provide a family for every child.

This way, from the National Foundation Niño Simón, a working Roundtable to join governmental and nongovernmental actors is being promoted. This Roundtable focuses more on the participants’ awareness and sensitivity to the issue rather than on their institutional responsibilities, in order to end the social invisibility that hides the violation of this fundamental right.

The Roundtable has completed five days of work, tackling the most critical aspects that prevent children from fulfilling their right and the keys to solve them. The breach of parental responsibility has been analysed along with the need of having more control instances to protect the rights of children and to assist them if their rights are violated. This does not mean resorting to family separation of deprivation of parental authority alone, but also to evaluate the Best Interest of the Child in the face of what is known as the “Abusive Denial of Consent” by the family of origin. After analysing critical elements, the lack of precise periods of time, the duplicity and the absence of effectiveness of the increasingly great number of technical reports emerge along with the need to search for families for the children that need them. At this point, the terms are discussed of a superior emergency instance to coordinate and articulate the actors that can guarantee the egress of children from institutions. One of the main challenges is the complete eradication of the invisibility through a transparent monitoring system, so that the right to family life is no longer violated.

Organisations that are part of the RELAF network participate in this Roundtable, such as FUNDANA and PROADOPCION. The latter takes part actively through its Director, José Gregorio Fernández, who is also a member of the RELAF Latin American Consultative Council.

We hope that, sooner than later, the Roundtable will build recommendations and adapt proceedings, regulations and guidelines in order to make a direct, sustainable impact on the improvement of the situation of hundreds of children deprived of parental care and subjected to the harms of institutionalisation. This is a Latin American social debt that seldom finds engaged decision makers willing to pay it off.