A single person filed a complaint Thursday for discrimination in adoption procedures in Paris, because his family situation is, according to him, invoked by the prefecture to refuse him to adopt a French child, his lawyer said, reigniting the controversy over discrimination for adoption in France.
For more than ten years, Hédi Sfaxi's case has never been selected for the adoption of a French child. This 55-year-old Parisian nevertheless meets the necessary reception conditions, and is the father of a Vietnamese child whom he adopted in 2006.
"It's not worth asking for French children"
"I've always been told since that time: it's not worth asking for French children," Hédi Sfaxi told AFP. According to him, "the files of single people are not presented by the prefecture to family councils", the collegial bodies whose opinion is decisive in choosing a family with one child.
A practice which would have been confirmed to him during a meeting with the Departmental Direction of Social Cohesion (DDCS) of Paris in 2019. “The director told me that this practice + was a precedent +,” says Hédi Sfaxi.
Echoing the first discriminations denounced
His complaint, addressed to the Paris prosecutor's office for “discrimination on the grounds of family status”, echoes a controversy over the discrimination suffered during adoption procedures by homosexual couples and single people.
In March 2019, the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (Igas) had pinpointed adoption practices in Seine-Maritime in a report, admitting that “there was an unspoken rule favoring heteroparental couples” in this department.
In the same report, which prompted the Rouen prosecutor's office to open a judicial investigation in early June, the Igas stressed that "the exclusion of single people from national adoption would be commonly practiced in a majority of family councils in France".
Despite the adoption by the government of a code of ethics for family councils, "this discrimination exists throughout France, not only in Paris, or in Seine-Maritime", considers Hédi Sfaxi.
File a complaint with "the hope that things will change"
Supported by the Stop Homophobie and Mousse associations, he lodges a complaint with "the hope that things will change and that preconceived ideas so that single people and same-sex couples do not adopt fall." “This action is part of a national movement to denounce this discrimination,” his lawyer, Etienne Deshoulières, confirmed to AFP.
"The problem is that when we talk about the best interests of the child, we can put what we want (...) and in particular homophobic reflections, opposed to homoparentality or single people", he added, denouncing the arguments according to which the children adopted by these families could experience it as "a trauma".
Society
Metz: A doctor passes before the Order of Physicians for refusing a certificate to a gay couple
Society
Homosexuality: Four couples of women fight to adopt their child born abroad by PMA
- Family
- Justice
- Child
- Couple
- Adoption
- Society