Family Minister stresses children's sacrosanct right to live in a family

Children who had no hope of ever being reunited with their natural parents should be given up for adoption because they had the sacrosanct right to live within a family, Family Minister Dolores Cristina said yesterday.

Ms Cristina said she wanted to see the courts exercise more often their right to remove parental rights and give the children up for adoption.

"I would like to see this happening more because I believe that children have the right to live in a family and we have many families who would like to adopt," she said.

In a report published on Tuesday, outgoing Children's Commissioner Carmen Zammit said incompetent mothers and fathers who refused to reform should have their parental rights permanently removed.

She echoed the words of the former CEO of the Foundation for Social Welfare Services, Joe Gerada, who, in October 2008, insisted that failed parents should be forced to give their children up for adoption rather than condemn them to an institute for years.

Mrs Cristina said the law allowed for children to be permanently taken from their parents and given up for adoption. "Children should have the sacrosanct right to live within a family," she insisted.

Ms Cristina said that, although fostering was a very good alternative to a natural family, there should also be other alternatives to children who spent many years living in an institution, never knowing what it meant to live in a family.

Time is also of the essence when taking such decisions. "I am not a social worker, a psychologist or an expert on children but they say that, even at a young age, by the time they are a year or 18 months, children would already have felt the absence of living in a family," Mrs Cristina said.