Support for adopted people from Sri Lanka continues
Published: Thursday, Apr 25th 2024, 16:50
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The existing care and support services offered by Back to the Roots for adopted people from Sri Lanka will continue until the end of 2025. The Conference of Cantonal Justice and Police Directors (KKJPD) is funding the project for another year, as the Back to the Roots association announced on Thursday.
So far, around 70 adopted people from Sri Lanka have been able to benefit from the offer, continued Celin Fässler from the Back to the Roots association. The findings since the start of the official funding were decisive for the continued funding until the end of 2025.
The pilot project as part of Switzerland's migration partnership with Sri Lanka was originally limited to three years until the end of 2024. A maximum of CHF 250,000 was available per year.
Since the introduction of the service, adopted people who wanted to find out more about their origins have been coming forward. The main focus is on the desire to find out something about their own origins.
This means time-consuming searches for documents in Switzerland and Sri Lanka as well as time-consuming investigations on the ground into individuals and the search for clues. The procedures to find clues often take more than a year. Due to the often unlawful procedures, a conventional search is usually impossible. This requires flexible and dynamic support in individual cases.
For many adopted people, it is important that the federal government and cantons take their responsibilities seriously, as they share responsibility for the injustice that occurred, the report continued. The authorities systematically looked the other way from the 1970s to the 1990s, when almost 900 children from Sri Lanka were adopted into Switzerland, most of them illegally, as a report by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) from February 2020 showed.
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