How a rural court trafficked African children into the EU

A cautionary tale about inter country adoption

An AI generated image of a child in rural DR Congo

I wrote last week summarising a scandal that rocked Croatia in 2022-23: eight Croatian nationals were arrested in Zambia on child trafficking charges. They were trying to leave the country with children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (“DRC”).

This is the first article to delve deeper into this story, which shows how the Croatian courts and institutions “laundered” the kidnap of the children.

The techniques I will describe include:

• Circumventing adoption bans

• Failure to provide a legal representative for the child

• Forum shopping

• Preferential assignment of judges

• Manipulated timeframes

• Failure to apply the relevant laws

• Failure to follow the required procedure

• Failure to authenticate documents

• Copy-pasted judgments

• Failure to complete required personal data

• Arbitrary rulings on record-keeping

This will help parents, politicians and professionals understand how children are judicially trafficked, in many countries, not only in Croatia. And not only in international adoption cases but also in domestic ones, as well as in child custody and abduction cases.

The goal is to stop all forms of institutional child trafficking.

More than 120 children from DRC were brought illegally into the EU with the help of Croatian courts and Government bodies since 2012. As far as I know the European Commission has only given this non-answer to a question by Croatian MEP Ladislav Ilčić.

The Croatian Government refuses to disclose what happened to the children. We do know that one child was adopted with the consent of the parents, and that a small number are with adoptive families in Croatia and are happy and well looked-after. But we do not know if the others are alive or dead. We do not know if they are abused by their carers, were trafficked into the sex trade, in Croatia or beyond, or used for organ harvesting.

Organ harvesting may soon be your problem

Before you stop reading, it is important that you understand that human trafficking is proliferating in the current environment where corruption is tolerated and crime goes unpunished. With it, the risk of organ harvesting is rising. These crimes can affect anyone, including you and those you love.

On October 18, 2024, news outlets reported that Kentucky resident TJ Hoover woke up on an operating table to find out that his organs were about to be removed. Officials cite “safeguarding protocols”, but victims of the family courts and similarly corrupt institutions know that such protocols are currently not worth the paper they are written on.

News headline: Man Who Was Pronounced Dead Wakes Up on Operating Table Moments Before Having Organs Removed in ‘Horrifying’ Mistake

Desperate people will pay enormous sums for a replacement organ to save their own lives or the life of a loved one. There are people prepared to fulfil that wish and pocket the cash, even if means committing murder.

If you need convincing that this goes on, do an internet search and see the news and reports from NGOs. It is important to be aware of the risks. You might wish to opt-out of the register of donors if your country allows you to do so, until we manage to combat the current dangerous levels of corruption and organised crime.

Croatia is a leading country for organ transplantation, which is unusual given its small population and economy, and concerning given its high levels of corruption.

There have been cases where individuals suspected to have been trafficked turned up at Croatian hospitals to “donate” kidneys. Families of Roma children who were taken into State care or died in hospital fear their children ended up victims of organ harvesting or sex trafficking.

As more and more children are taken from their families for no good reason and disappear from State care, across the EU, UK, USA and elsewhere, we have an increasing need to be concerned.

Media report about suspected organ trafficking at a major Zagreb hospital

Decaying institutions

Judges who are prepared to process cases concerning vulnerable children in a negligent and unlawful manner pose a threat to everyone who relies on the courts.

I speak about this with authority because the same court that laundered the trafficking of over 60 individuals from DR Congo laundered the kidnap of my children by their father from the United Kingdom. None of the Croatian officials I informed about this have taken action.

British, EU and Swiss officials I have made aware of the problem do not seem to be able to grasp how shocking the malpractice at the Zlatar Municipal Court is, in our case or in the cases of the Congolese children.

The 2023 investigation into the Congo adoption scandal that was published over 6 days in a major Croatian newspaper, Jutarnji list, shows exactly how bad it is.

Buyer beware

This is a sore point to bring up, as journalists found that the adoption “charity” at the centre of the scandal had duped people into believing there was nothing illegal about buying children.

It will be distressing for families that stumbled innocently into a child trafficking ring through trying to fulfil their wish to have a child to have their happiness tainted by the involvement of organised crime, or to suspect that the child they brought into their lives was taken without the consent of their parents.

But it is better to know than to live in fear. The sooner we know, the higher the chance the children have to trace their roots and be reunited with their parents, if that is their wish. And the sooner those responsible can be dealt with, and the problems fixed so that the public is not put at risk by these unlawful practices.

This is also a cautionary tale about the predatory adoption industry, which is continuously evolving new ways to obtain “stock”, as one employee of a UK adoption charity referred to children in an internal memo. The adoption industry is always dreaming up innovative new ways to transfer “ownership” of commodified children, for example by engineering indirect payments to circumvent the law. Buyer beware.

EU standards??

Croatia is a Member State of the European Union. As such, people assume that it is a country that is scrupulous about applying the rule of law, that it respects human rights and equalities.

As this recent documentary (English transcript here) makes clear, it is not. The documentary includes the testimony of former senior judges which is very helpful for understanding how political and legal corruption have developed hand in hand.

A glance at the Rule of Law reports published by the European Commission over the last few years shows that the EU bodies are well aware of how bad the situation is in Croatia. Yet, while Hungary and Poland are regularly reprimanded by the Commission, it remains silent on the bloc’s worst offender, Croatia.

This is curious. Is this a political deal, or a more personal, financial one?

Croatia is consistently the worst performing country on the EU Justice Scoreboard

Why this matters

I can tell you exactly why this matters. It has impacted me personally, and poses a risk for anyone relying on functioning courts.

It was in the same court in the quiet rural backwater of Zlatar that my children were judicially trafficked into Croatia following their kidnap from the UK by their father in 2016.

It is clear from my interactions with the UK authorities that they either assume that Croatian courts are capable of complying with the law, or that for political reasons they are not prepared to rock the boat. Third and fourth possibilities are that some know perfectly well that crimes are being committed in children’s legal cases and they are prepared to tolerate it, or do not know what to do about it.

Neither judges nor politicians are keen to second-guess the decisions of the courts in another country, or even exercise the least amount of due diligence to check whether the judgments are lawful. But people have told my family that a little bit of money will buy you whatever you want in Croatia. Or, as Croatians themselves know all too well, to get what you want, you need “veze” – connections.

Few people imagined that corruption in the courts could happen in children’s cases. But my own experience, and that of countless others, shows that it especially happens in children’s cases, because there is a lot of money in them. Adoption, residential care and children’s law are all multi-billion dollar industries, and they intersect with some very nasty and even more lucrative illegal trades.

It is vital that politicians and judges become aware that the primary duty of a judge is to provide a fair trial. This means they must not be biased in favour of another judge, or a public institution over a private individual. They do need to do the due diligence, to examine other judges’ work, and they do have a right and a duty to call out bad practice when they can see it would harm someone.

If judges are not impartially and conscientiously verifying judgments from other countries, we lose a vital barrier against child trafficking.

In January 2023 Croatia became part of the Schengen area, meaning there are no border controls between that country and the rest of the EU. That means that if Croatia allows children to be trafficked into the country, there are no restrictions on them dispersing throughout the EU, where they disappear without trace.

Even with border controls, with such high levels of corruption in Croatia we can be sure it is not difficult to move children across borders.

Should Croatia be part of Schengen or the EU under these circumstances?

What are we to make of EU officials that are perfectly appraised of this but completely silent? Or who attend an event titled “Pornfilmfestival” in their official capacity? (The pornography industry relies on the exploitation of women and children).

Web page announcing the European Commission as an official participant in Pornfilmfest

Here is a summary of the first article from the 2023 major investigation into the Congo adoption scandal by Croatian daily newspaper newspaper Jutarnji list, which reveals just how shockingly bad the practices were at the same court that destroyed my children’s childhoods.

Article: The terrible truth about adopting children from Africa

This article was published on Saturday 17 June 2023, the first in a series of major investigative reports published over 6 days in Jutarnji list, all written by Slavica Lukić and Željka Godec.

This report focused on the Municipal Court in Zlatar. Zlatar is a tiny town in a sleepy rural region 60 km from Zagreb, and very close to where I had lived in Croatia. This is why it was the court that (mis)handled my children’s abduction and custody cases. It was a shock for me and for the Croatian public to hear that most of the adoption cases of the Congolese children were handled in this out-of-the way rural court.

Map showing the location of the small town of Zlatar in a remote part of the rural Zagorje region

The report dealt with a sample of 54 adoption cases from across the country. Of these, 23 were from Zlatar. The last publicly available information is that there were over 120 cases altogether, with over 60 handled in Zlatar.

The report outlined significant irregularities in child adoption procedures from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in Croatian courts, particularly in Zlatar.

Violations of the Civil Procedure Code and Congolese law

A judge named Jasmina Božić at the Krapina local branch of the Municipal Court in Zlatar processed the majority of applications to “legalise” the adoption of children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is something close to home for me, as it was this very court that my children’s butchered custody case first took place in.

In one case, an adoptive mother, without a husband or partner, asked for recognition of an adoption order for a two-year-old girl from DR Congo. According to Article 655 of the Congolese Family Code, only married couples can apply for adoption, after five years of marriage. The Croatian courts are supposed to check that the adoption is compliant with the laws of both the sending and receiving country.

Judge Božić was not given the case through random algorithmic assignment, but was selected specifically to hear the case. The hearing lasted only ten minutes. The potential adoptive mother waived her right to appeal - but there was no other party who could complain. The two-year-old girl had no-one to represent her interests.

By waiving the appeal, Judge Božić absolved herself of the need to reason her decision. Ten minutes later, at 10.10 a.m., she stamped the order and issued a decision legalising the court judgment that would enable the woman to obtain citizenship for the child and bring her to Croatia.

There should have been two parties in this civil procedure, which is supposed to be litigated, with a legal guardian representing the interests of the child.

The journalists claim that the judge did not name the girl's biological parents or state whether they were alive, that she did not even try to check the authenticity of the documents, nor whether the adoptive mother was in the Register of Adoptive Parents held by the Croatian ministry responsible for social care.

Five minutes after this 10-minute hearing, the same judge began a new hearing. This case also was about the adoption of a two-year-old child from DRC by a woman from Zagreb, also on her own. Again, it was not assigned to Judge Božić in a random manner.

The hearing for this case lasted five minutes longer, and the outcome was the same.

These two decisions are just two examples of what the journalists call gross negligence and violations of the law in an institution that is supposed to uphold the laws, the same as 52 other judgments that the journalists saw from courts throughout Croatia. The adoptive parents included public figures such as people from the entertainment business, local politicians, lawyers, journalists, economic experts and a diplomat.

The journalists say these decisions are just the tip of the iceberg in the Zambia scandal which shook Croatia for months and raised suspicions that Croatia is part of an illegal network of adoption of children from one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world.

The journalists analysed the documents with the help of a dozen experts, including judges, academics, lawyers and social workers. Most would only speak anonymously, considering that the international adoption business is not something that the Government wishes to be discussed publicly.

In the wake of the scandal, the Croatian Government announced amendments to the Law on Private International Law, which should bring "more legal certainty" to international adoptions and said that the Congo scandal should never happen again. But after the release of the couples from detention in Zambia, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said that there was no problem with the adoptions because the judge in Zambia said it had not been proven that the couples had trafficked children or that the adoption documents were forged. So, the journalists ask, if all is well, does that mean that the Congo case can indeed happen again?

Insiders say, and claim they have evidence, that the Zambian Government let the four Croatian couples go following pressure by the US authorities. The USA has for many years been a major supporter of the lucrative international adoption business. It is rumoured that the USA arranged for Croatia to forgive a debt that Zambia owed to that country in return for the acquittal of the eight adopters.

To be fair though, was it the adopters who should have been facing child trafficking charges? It rather seems that the people running the adoption charities that brokered the adoptions are the ones engaging in criminal activity.

A free pass?

Following the enormous media storm in Croatia, no steps appear to have been taken in response to the evidence of gross negligence in Zlatar Municipal Court.

If the spike in adoptions from DRC following the acquittal of the “My Family” adoption charity’s founder from charges of fraud in 2012 is anything to go by, this suggests that judges will be free to continue to traffic children from Congo in increasing numbers.

And what of children like mine, who as a result of other atrocious family law judgments in the Croatian courts are trapped right now against their will with an abusive parent?

In the UK we are currently conducting the murder trial of Sara Sharif, a little girl whose Polish mother lost custody of her children in exactly this way.

What of the case still being heard in a local branch of the Zlatar court, in which my children’s father is trying to defraud me and my family of money and property? That judge is one of those named in handling the Congo adoptions. Did she make a mistake that she will be reluctant to repeat, or does she make judgments to order? Let’s hope will she act on the evidence and protect my family’s rights.

Other facts about the Congo adoption cases in Zlatar

Ban of adoptions from DR Congo

The journalists asked how the Croatian courts could legalise the alleged judgments of the Congolese court, because the Democratic Republic of the Congo had banned the adoption of children by foreigners since 2017 – with no exceptions.

This was apparently said in a statement to the French media by Gauthier Luyela, director in charge of child protection at the Congolese Ministry of Family and Children. A spokesperson from the Supreme Court in Croatia published a statement condemning the Jutarnji report’s critique of the Croatian judiciary, challenging how the journalists felt qualified to comment the admittedly complex law on adoptions from DRC. But it would seem the journalists were a good deal more qualified than the judges were.

According to information from the US State Department, the 2013 suspension of international adoptions from DRC was extended in 2016 until the Government of DRC establishes a public body responsible for adoptions. Since no such body exists, it does appear that adoptions are still not allowed and that it is not possible to obtain exit permits for children.

(Could it be that Croatia is being used as a back door for adoptions to the USA? The children receive Croatian citizenship meaning there is no barrier to adoption. US State Department data does not show large numbers of adoptions from Croatia, but the children may not be travelling by direct or official routes. This would explain the alleged interest of the USA in the Zambia criminal case.)

At the very least, judges should be exercising extreme caution in adoption cases involving the DRC, and judge Željko Pajalić of the Supreme Court in his statement does not explain how this could have been done in hearings lasting just 10 minutes.

Judge Pajalić claims that the names of the biological parents were in fact entered in the court documents, but without seeing evidence we cannot know if this is correct. He asks us to have confidence that Croatian judges do not hate children, but I would invite Judge Pajalić to speak to my children to ask them what they think of Croatian judges – or indeed any judges. I am certain that there are thousands of children and families that take an equally dim view of his colleagues’ integrity.

A problem raised by the Jutarnji article is that of discriminatory practices at the expense of children of African origin in comparison to their white Croatian peers. I would question whether the rights of any children are upheld in Croatian courts, but it does seem that the approach taken to the Congolese children was negligent to the point of dehumanising them completely.

This does create an aspect that many parents and children impacted by malpractice in family law cases agree with me on: that these abhorrent family law practices have their roots in the slave trade, when human beings were commodities traded by others for money or influence. This is exactly how my children were treated by the family courts, not just in Croatia but in the United Kingdom and especially in Switzerland.

Certainly the thought of African children being treated in a manner that is so utterly negligent brings back unpleasant reminders of slavery. Without an investigation into where those children are, we cannot know that they did not in fact end up in some form of slavery. This has happened in the recent past, for example Ireland where children taken from unmarried mothers ended up in foster care where they were used for unpaid labour and sexually abused.

Allocation to preferred judges

More than 60 percent of the adoptions handled at the Muncipal Court in Zlatar were not assigned randomly to judges, to ensure impartiality. They were specifically assigned to certain judges. The troubling thing is the Minister of Justice and Public Administration, Ivan Malenica, claimed otherwise for months.

The list of judges hearing the cases in the Zlatar court and its local branches is:

Jasmina Božić - 11

Barbara Čuček - 4

Sanja Leskovar-Hostić - 4

Romana Mališ - 2

Vesna Posavec - 2

Nataša Večković Jurman - 1

Nine out of 11 adoptions were heard by Judge Božić in an extremely short timeframe, and were assigned to her specifically.

Six out of eight cases heard by Judges Čuček and Leskovar-Hostić were assigned specifically to them.

Forum shopping

Of 23 adoption cases heard in Zlatar, only three applicants had an address in that court's territory. All the others travelled from other parts of the country in order to legalise adoption orders for children from DR Congo.

As the journalists write, it seems “they found out that the court in Zlatar is extremely permeable and expeditious, so it confirms verdicts from the Democratic Republic of the Congo sometimes in two, and in the worst case in ten days!”

They further found that the Municipal Court judges copy-pasted judgments “with less caution than if it were a case of the import of a household pet”.

They say that not in a single one of these cases was the recognition of foreign court decisions, relating to 27 children, carried out in accordance with the procedure that the Supreme Court considers correct.

They further state: “In all those years, in 15 cases, none of the judges who decided on them considered it appropriate to refer to a single letter of the law.”

They found that two judgments from 2018 were at least to some extent based on the law. One was signed by Nataša Večković Jurman who referred to the then valid Law on Resolving Conflicts of Laws with the Regulations of Other Countries. As will become clearer as we progress through this series, this may be why this judge was not asked to hear more cases.

They say that in all other cases, when the judges invoked the law, they referred to the Law on the Resolution of Conflict of Laws, which has not been in force since January 29, 2019. In some cases, the judges referred to a law that at that time had been out of force for three and a half years.

Between September 2021 and November 2022, one Zagreb couple adopted five girls, despite the fact that Article 656 of the Congolese Family Code categorically states: "No one may adopt more than three children." A curiosity: the reporters found that this Zagreb couple shares a home address with one of the couples arrested in Zambia.

Manipulating timeframes

In one case, in which the adoptive mother is a public figure, the legalisation of her documents took place in only two days: a final decision was dated in DR Congo September 17, and was legalised in Croatia by Judge Božić on September 19.

This is how the reporters describe the process:

“That decision deserves to be included in the "believe it or not" section: the verdict from the Congo, which was at best dispatched from the court office on September 17, arrived in Croatia on the 18th, the adoptive mother from Zagreb forwarded the request for recognition of that verdict to the Municipal Court in Zlatar on the same day and it received it on the same day (!), and then immediately forwarded it to the Permanent Service in Krapina, so that the "algorithm" immediately assigned it to Judge Bozić and immediately issued to the parties a notice of a hearing, which they received on the same day, and the judge took care of the matter on the morning of the next day!?”

This particularly stings for me because between July 2016 and October 2017 my children were trapped in Hague child abduction proceedings in the court in Zlatar, which were only supposed to take 6 weeks end to end.

I have just heard from a British mother having the same happen in her child’s case - hearings repeatedly cancelled and postponed. By now we have learned this is a tactic. We know that courts can very speedily find time for hearings when they want to.

After the Zlatar court unlawfully refused to return my children, we ended up in a child custody case, in 2018 and 2019, with judge Vinko Vladić who later became President of Zlatar Municipal Court. We have waited as much as a year between hearings.

It is now clear that this court was at the same time assigning adoption cases to judges who were hearing them the next day.

Therefore, it can be said that the court allocates hearing dates in a preferential manner, and uses scheduling to manipulate outcomes.

As this was going on, my children and I have suffered emotional torture. My son said in 2019: “They have already stolen half of my childhood”.

It is now 2024 and the situation is no better.

In 2023 I gave up dealing with this court and the Croatian illegal system as a lost cause. The outcomes have been completely unlawful, as I can fully evidence. Let us not forget, however, the father who has knowingly dragged his own children through this torment, against their wishes.

Guardians ad litem

The procedure for legalising a foreign court judgment is, according to the Supreme Court in Croatia, a civil litigation with two parties. Since one of the parties in an adoption case is a minor child, according to Articles 9 of the European Convention on the Exercise of Children’s Rights someone should be appointed to protect his or her interests. In many countries, including Croatia, that person is a guardian ad litem who should be appointed by the court.

The reporters found that in none of the adoption proceedings for children from  Democratic Republic of the Congo conducted at the Municipal Court in Zlatar was any child given a legal guardian to protect his or her interests.

I must point out however that the notion of a guardian ad litem is an expensive fallacy. My children were appointed a guardian during their child custody case. She never met them, and did not attend any court hearings. In 2020, after I wrote to the Children’s Ombudsman, she did meet my children. They told her explicitly that they wished to return to me in England, and she urged me to ask the court to speed up its decision, and promised she would write a letter. It took her almost a year to send her one-page letter – saying that so much time had elapsed (due to delaying tactics by social services) that the children would need to be interviewed again. She was then replaced by the Deputy Head of the Centre for Legal Guardianship who upheld a completely unlawful opinion of social services without ever meeting my children.

The same behaviours are reported by parents who have interacted with Cafcass and Tusla, the bodies that provide legal guardians in the UK and Ireland, and the same is true for guardians ad litem in the USA. Guardians ad litem appear to be driven by political ideology and money. They cost litigants and taxpayers a fortune, and as far as children are concerned are almost always worse than useless.

Disastrous record-keeping

The journalists point out that while adoption records for domestic adoptions are permanent, for the children from Africa the timeframe for keeping records was determined arbitrarily and ranged from ten to thirty years.

Lest it be said that there is anything good about the domestic adoption industry, I have to point out that although record-keeping may be better for domestic adoptions than for international ones, domestic adoptees often struggle with access to their records.

In the case of children whose adoption was approved by the court in Zlatar, some will lose their chance to find out the truth about themselves and their biological parents by the age of 12 or 13, just as they may be beginning to explore their identity.

No verification

According to the procedure set out by the Supreme Court, the courts are obliged to check whether prospective adopters are on the Register of Adoptive Parents in Croatia and to forward all the documentation to the Ministry responsible for social care. According to the documents seen by the journalists, they did not do these things in any of the cases.

Because the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Abolition of the Requirement of Legalisation of Foreign Public Documents, or any treaty that facilitates mutual recognition, the documents should have gone through a procedure of full legalisation. The Croatian judges should have checked whether the foreign court orders were forged. They could have done this through the Croatian diplomatic and consular network. They did not.

The Croatian judges did not even try to check the authenticity of the signatures and seals on the Congolese verdicts.

In my children’s Hague child abduction case heard in Zlatar, judge Neven Kucelj had evidently not dealt with a case like this before. He could have asked for assistance from the International Hague Network of Judges, which has been in existence since 1998, from the Ministry of Social Policy or from the UK authorities. I no longer have much faith in any of these bodies anyway, but I had the impression that he simply could not be bothered, or that the lack of foreign language capacity at the court may have been a barrier. There are also EU and HCCH guidelines on implementing the Hague child abduction convention, but at an event launching the new Brussels ii recast regulation, I learned that most judges don’t know that these exist.

I remember judge Vinko Vladić saying at a custody hearing that the law changed so many times that judges found themselves unable to keep up. And indeed, looking at the UK courts, I see magistrates and part-time judges hearing family and Hague Convention cases who do not have an understanding of the relevant legal frameworks or familiarity with practice guidelines. It is no wonder, because the regulations are laid out in a way that is difficult to navigate, understand or find. So although I am no fan of judges, I can’t help having some sympathy when I consider this.

I stumbled across Judge Vladić's CV on the Croatian Judicial Network website. I am not a native speaker of Croatian, but I suspected that the language used was not that of someone with a high degree of literacy. I asked other family court victims in Croatia for their opinion. This is what they told me:

“[Judges] are so backward and unintelligent that it’s painful”

“Wtf what’s this? They study their dicks, not the law”

“No more illiterate than any of the ten or so child trafficker judges that I have met by now and read their illiterate shit”

I am not being mean about Judge Vladić, as he comes across as quite a nice chap even though he did not protect my children’s interests. But there really is a possibility that in Croatia, the nepotism involved in selecting judges does not result in the recruitment of people with the skills needed to master and keep up with developments in all the areas of law that they work across. A friend who works as a legal academic told me that Croatian judges are completely out of their depth in international cases.

However, judges hearing assigned cases from out of their area in two days must have been aware that what they were doing was wrong. This could fall under the criminal offence of misfeasance in public office, Abuse of power and authority under Article 291 of the Croatian Criminal Code. (However, to enforce it you need a functioning police service, State Prosecutor and judiciary, so we are in a Catch-22).

Copy-pasted judgments

Jutarnji list saw several copies of Congolese adoption judgments which showed that the content of all verdicts and participants in the proceedings was exactly the same. Only the names of the children, the biological and adoptive parents had been changed.

These rulings from the Children's Court in Kinshasa, a city with more than seventeen million inhabitants, defy the laws of physics: the same people were at two different hearings on the same day at the same hour.

All the signatures on these documents, as stated in the certified Croatian translations of the Congolese verdicts, were illegible.

Although many of the adoptive parents claimed that their children came from an orphanage, according to the Congolese judgments the children were not in an orphanage, but in Kinshasa, two thousand kilometres away, in several cases in the same foster family.

These Congolese verdicts were legalised by the court in Zlatar with no hesitation.

A retired Supreme Court judge who reviewed the judgments with the reporters said that none of these judgments legalising the Congolese adoption order would stand up to scrutiny, saying they were “ashamed to see this".

And yet, as in my children’s cases, none of these huge mistakes is being treated as problematic by the Croatian institutions. The Judicial Inspectorate of the Ministry of Justice “did not find any irregularities” during a review of the work of the Municipal Courts in Varaždin and Zlatar.

I am so used to the Croatian institutions not finding any irregularities that I do not consider it worthwhile asking for reviews any more. These are now matters that the public must put directly on the table of their elected officials, as well as putting to the court of public opinion.

It has been said to me time and again by politicians in Croatia and the UK, the executive is not authorised to interfere with the decisions of the courts as this would undermine judicial independence, and this is what the Croatian Minister of Justice said in the Congo case. But the judicial authorities responsible for reviewing the work of judges are so far from being fit for purpose that they might as well be on Mars.

The Supreme Court in Croatia also said that "they did not encounter irregularities in the work of the courts," but had found "legal gaps that in practice led to uncoordinated action of the courts and the competent Ministry."

These have led to tweaks in the legislation. But what are they going to do about incompetent, negligent, corrupt judges?

And what are they going to do about judgments that have placed children at current risk of harm?

If the judges were independent, we would not have a problem. Our problem is exactly the lack of judicial independence, competence and accountability, and this is where we need a response from Government. The independence argument is being used to pass the buck.

The Supreme Court must understand that there is no reason for the public to have any confidence in Croatian judges, and that is exactly what is reflected in the EU’s Rule of Law reports year after year. Perhaps Croatian judges need to get together to discuss what they should do about this.

The evidence from the Congo scandal, from my children’s case and many other family law cases… from people who have had their property spirited out of their ownership at the whim of a judge… from scandal after scandal... in Osijek, the Zdravko Mamic scandal, with the same judges, politicians and psychiatrists still frequenting a children’s home to rape the vulnerable youngsters. Whistleblowers arrested and put in psychiatric institutions to get them out of the way.

These things are abhorrent, and unfortunately not confined to Croatia. Victims of the judicial mafia in many countries will find much that is familiar here I am sure.

Let’s hope we are on the road to exterminating this evil and getting back some semblance of justice, so that human life will no longer be for sale.

NEXT INSTALMENT...

A summary of the second instalment from the Jutarnji list investigation, exposing how adoptive couples went forum shopping all over Croatia to find judges who would bend the law.

More information

This is a summary of the first of a 6-day investigative report by Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji list into the scandal over the adoption of dozens of children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo into Croatia.

These reports were behind a paywall.

For a translation into English or more information about the original report in Jutarnji list please get in touch.

See also: