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| Putin in a State Council Presidium meeting on December, 27. [Photo: The Presidential Press and Information Office] |
Moscow: Russian President Vladimir
Putin signed a contentious bill into a law on Friday that bans US citizens from
adopting Russian children and imposes other sanctions in retaliation for a new
US human rights law that he says is poisoning relations.
Even though the proposal,
had drew fierce criticism from Russian liberals and subsequently some top country
officials including the foreign minister openly opposed the bill and Mr. Putin
himself had been noncommittal about it last week, but he signed it less than 24
hours after receiving it from Parliament, where both houses passed it
overwhelmingly.
The law, which has
ignited outrage among Russian liberals and child rights' advocates, takes
effect on Jan. 1.
Hours after Russian
President Vladimir Putin signed a controversial law banning the adoption of
Russian children by American families, the US State Department on Friday called
the measure “politically motivated.”
We deeply regret Russia’s
passage of a law ending inter-country adoptions between the United States and
Russia,” State Department Spokesman Patrick Ventrell was quoted as saying by
the state news agency RIA Novosti on Friday.
The adoption ban is part
of Russia’s response to the US Magnitsky Act, which was signed into law by US
President Barack Obama earlier this month.
Critics of the adoption
ban said it would keep tens of thousands of children, especially those with
disabilities, in Russia’s orphanage system.
Figures from the US State
Department show more than 60,000 Russian children adopted by American families
in the last 20 years, including 962 last year.
Vladimir Lukin, head of
the Russian Human Rights Commission and a former ambassador to Washington, said
he would challenge the law in the Constitutional Court.
UNICEF estimates that
there are about 740,000 children not in parental custody in Russia while about
18,000 Russians are on the waiting list to adopt a child. The U.S. is the
biggest destination for adopted Russian children more than 60,000 of them have
been taken in by Americans over the past two decades.
A few lawmakers even
claimed that some Russian children were adopted by Americans only to be used
for organ transplants or become sex toys or cannon fodder for the U.S. Army. A
spokesman with Russia’s dominant Orthodox Church said that children adopted by
foreigners and raised outside the church will not enter God’s kingdom.
Russian officials blame
US adoptive parents for the deaths of at least 19 of those children.
The bill was introduced
in reaction to a U.S. law known as the Magnitsky Act that imposes sanctions on
Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses.
It is named after Sergei
Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing Russian lawyer who was physically abused and died
in a Moscow prison in 2009.
The adoptions ban was
unanimously approved on December 26 by the Federation Council, the upper house
of the Russian parliament. It had been passed earlier by the lower chamber, the
State Duma.
The bill has further
increased tensions in U.S.-Russian relations, which were already strained by
the adoption in the United States of the Magnitsky Act.