Supreme Court president Radovan Dobronic told N1 television on Sunday, that the authenticity of all decisions regarding the adoption of children from the DR Congo, that were upheld by Croatian courts, is being checked.

Dobronic confirmed that the authenticity of those decisions is being verified, but declined to comment any further in order not to harm the case of the Croatian adoptive parents who are being tried in Zambia.

“There is a problem in legal and political practice in the DR Congo. It is true that the DR Congo made an amendment to its law prohibiting international adoption procedures until a central body is formed, however, that body has not been formed since 2016. The director in their agency has said that no exceptions are allowed at all, but it is undisputable that after 2016 the courts have issued somewhere between 40 and 70 decisions approving international adoptions,” he said.

The DR Congo has signed The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which states that the basic criterion for decisions on the rights of the child is the welfare of the child, says Dobronic, so some Congolese courts in some cases have decided that approving international adoption represents the welfare of the child.

In doing so, the court did not violate the law because the international convention has priority in its application over the domestic law, Dobronic claims, adding that “everything that has happened lead us to believe that the Congolese government and courts in the country were on the warpath.”

Asked whether the Croatian courts were obliged to check the legalization of documents, Dobronic said “the courts should have acted more cautiously”, and now they are instructed to act more precisely.

Cases of adoptions that already went through cannot be revised

However, the explanation provided by the DR Congo court that they had certain documents from Croatian social welfare centres, which they accepted without legalisation.

It is possible, according to the principle of reciprocity, that if one country does not request legalization, we don’t have to either, so our judges accepted a considerable risk and failed to send the documents to the regular procedure of legalization, he said.

Dobronic also believes that it is not possible to review adoption cases that have already been completed.

“What was carried out, those are legally conducted procedures and registrations and cannot be contested. Suspicion is one thing, and it must be proven beyond any doubt,” he said.

Dobronic believes that there is a chance that the proceedings against the eight adoptive parents will be transferred from Zambia to Croatia, underlining that the adopted children are Croatian citizens.

“Zambia has no basis to dispute the Croatian citizenship of these children because the documents issued by the MUP are valid, they are not forgeries. The least they have to do is to allow the representatives of our country to visit these children,” Dobronic told N1 .