Friendly meeting with Spanish families adopting Vietnamese children

Since the late 1990s, Spanish families have come to Vietnam to find and adopt Vietnamese children. Up to now, around 800 families throughout Spain have adopted children from many provinces of Vietnam, creating a network of friends who have close ties with Vietnam.

Each Spanish family usually adopts a single Vietnamese child, but some families also adopt two children.

At the meeting, Vietnamese Ambassador to Spain Ngo Tien Dung emphasized the duty of the Embassy to continue protecting citizens, as the adopted children are up to the age of 18, affirming the Vietnamese government’s policies of always considering overseas Vietnamese people an inseparable part and a powerful source of the Vietnamese national community, and always gives them opportunities to look toward their origins and have the opportunity to contribute to the construction and protection of the country.

The Ambassador also discussed with the families about the relationship between the two countries over the past time. He emphasized that 2017 would mark the 40th anniversary of the diplomatic relations establishment between the two countries. He also thanked the families for adopting and taking care of Vietnamese children well, with humanitarian values, and regarded them as important links and bridges that contribute to promoting human exchanges and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries in the short time as well as in the long run.

The Ambassador also listened to aspirations of the families to maintain and improve their understanding of Vietnamese culture, teach Vietnamese language, register their children's nationality so that their children can have opportunity to return to Vietnam to work and live. The embassy also committed its maximum support for the legitimate needs of families and children themselves, especially the embassy would take the initiative and maintain regular communication to timely exchange all necessary and relevant information for families, contributing to strengthening friendly relations and multi-faceted cooperation between the two sides.

Vietnam and Spain signed an agreement on child adoption in December 2007 and since Vietnam promulgated the Law on Adoption as well as the accession of The Hague Convention from 2011 to now, bilateral cooperation in the field has achieved encouraging results. Only in 2016, there are 152 Spanish families eligible to adopt Vietnamese children. In recent years, Vietnam’s Ministry of Justice has always sent working groups of the Department of Child Adoption to visit and work in Spain to review and solve obstacles to increase the effectiveness of cooperation in the field of bringing up adopted child between the two countries./.