A criminal organization trafficking newborn children has been uncovered by Ukrainian police in Kiev, national police chief Ihor Klimenko reported on Facebook on Tuesday. According to Klimenko, the newborns were sold to foreigners at a specialist clinic in Kiev for about $70,000.
The organizer of the trafficking ring was the head of the clinic, whose clients were foreigners. The illegal transactions were carried out by foreign men marrying Ukrainian women in a fictitious manner and then accepting a surrogate mother. Ukrainian women in turn abandoned the newborn child, and the “fathers” took the newborns abroad with them to an East Asian country. The police chief did not say to which country the children had been taken.
Investigators, according to Klimenko, documented the cases two years back. Authorities prevented the export of three newborns from the country and handed them over to the child protection service.
“At least 13 children, on the other hand, have already been sold and exported from Ukraine,” the police chief added. “I am convinced that this is not the last such criminal organization, because the Ukrainian legislation is too permissive on this issue. The line between surrogacy and child trafficking is very thin,” Klimenko pointed out. He stressed that lawmakers need to take action to curb this.
“Without stricter legal regulation of the issue, we can not completely prevent the sale of Ukrainian children abroad,” Klimenko said. In Ukraine, as the chief of police has pointed out, similar cases occur quite often.
UNIAN news agency recalled that at the end of April the authorities uncovered an organization that sold newborns to foreigners using the same method, i.e. fictitious marriage and use of a surrogate mother. The group was also operating out of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
