Legislation to be amended to make adoption easier
KINGSTON, Jamaica—Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, Senator Dana Morris Dixon, says amendment to the country’s legislation that facilitates adoption, as well as administrative changes in the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), will assist in making the adoption process less tedious.
The minister noted, too, that critical to the process is a framework around fostering.
Dr Morris Dixon was responding to questions during a post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House in St Andrew on Wednesday.
“We have to look at how we can make the process go quicker. We have to look at, obviously, the right of the parent versus the right of the child and how we can move it along more quickly. We have a lot of children in State care and we all know that the best place for our children is in a home with a loving family. It’s a family structure that you want them in, and so we have a responsibility to move that along more quickly but, legally, based on the Adoption Act, we are not able to move it at the speed we want to from that basis,” she said.
“So, we have to fix the law and then we have to fix administratively everything in the CPFSA to make it move more quickly, so we’re going to do that…; it’s really about facilitating faster adoptions in the country and also about adding a framework around fostering, which currently does not exist in our country,” the minister noted.
She said that a Joint Select Committee of Parliament would be formed to incorporate the views of more Jamaicans on the country’s adoption process.
“One of the things we are exploring is rolling everything into the CCPA (Child Care and Protection Act) because… when you think about it, it would be about adoptions, fostering, and so we’re looking at putting everything under that one umbrella. So, it’s going to be a big piece of legislation and we’re going to take it to a joint select committee because we know a lot of Jamaicans do have an interest in this area and we want to be able to ventilate any changes that we are going to make,” she continued.
-JIS
