A court in the city of Larisa has awarded a children’s charity with legal custody of a five-year-old girl who was taken last October by the authorities from a couple who were raising her as one of their own children.
The girl, called Maria, was spotted in a home in a Roma settlement in Farsala, in Thessaly, by a prosecutor, who became suspicious after noting that she bore no similarities to the couple claiming to be her parents.
Since her removal from the settlement, Maria has been in the care of the Smile of the Child organisation, which was now been awarded full legal custody.
Maria’s case made global headlines when police launched an international search to identify her biological parents after DNA tests proved she was not the offspring of the couple who had been raising her.
The case also fuelled anti-Roma stereotypes, with Maria’s blonde hair and blue eyes taken as proof that she had been abducted from a non-Roma parent. In comments that went around the world, the head of Smile of the Child told the media that he believed Maria was “either sold at maternity, or later abducted, for other … begging, they use these children for begging, or later for prostitution, or, even worse, for selling for other purposes”.
The Roma couple had told police that Maria was given into their care voluntarily by her Bulgarian biological parents, also Roma, when she was a baby. The discovery of her birth parents in Bulgaria late confirmed that story.
According to the ruling, the court accepted the prosecutor’s recommendation to award custody of the child to Smile of the Child and remove it from the Roma couple that had falsely presented themselves as her parents. The man who had appeared as her father attended the court hearing, held on March 18, but was not represented by a lawyer.
Moreover, the court rejected a custody request filed by the Bulgarian state child protection agency, which claimed the child on the basis that her biological parents are Bulgarian nationals.
The court deemed it was in the child’s best interest to stay in familiar surroundings, underlining that her alleged biological parents have expressed no interest in her.
Moving to Bulgaria would also require her to learn a new language, the court said. When Maria was taken into custody by Smile of the Child, she was found to speak the Roma language but very little Greek. Smile of the Child originally said that they didn’t want to “risk” getting an interpreter for her.
Meanwhile, the couple who Maria believed were her parents remain in custody on charges of abduction and falsification of documents.
Source: enetenglish, ana-mpa
