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Essentially, once we are assigned our children in Colombia and once we complete the adoption there, they fall into legal limbo: they have Colombian nationality but cannot apply for Spanish nationality as they have not been born in Spain and do not have Spanish parents. The Irish Adoption Board refuses to recognise the adoption until the children are registered in Spain. The children can be registered as British but it is a process that can take months. We have been promised by people in Britain that it will be done as quickly as possible but we are still left with the problem of potentially having no country to take the children to while we wait for British passports, as at the moment Spain refuses them entry visas and neither Ireland or Britain can confirm they can have entry visas to these countries as the adoption has been transmitted through the Spanish authorities, the country of our residence. The local authority which processed our adoption informed us in December that a letter from our respective Consulates guaranteeing that the children would be registered as our children by the Irish or British governments, would be sufficient to obtain a visa from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for them to enter Spain. Our lawyer in Spain has approached the Spanish Ministery of Foreign Affairs with a draft of such a letter from the British Consulate in Málaga, to be informed once more that there will be no visas issued: the children will only be allowed entry to Spain with Irish or British passports. We have been on the waiting list to adopt two children (siblings) since April 2004. The normal wait at the moment is of eighteen months but as we may be adopting two children that timescale is much more flexible and harder to predict how soon our children may be assigned. It took the Spanish authorities eight months to give a partial solution which at the moment is proving useless. The British authorities have promised to process the registration as fast as they can but can give no timescale. The Irish authorities have been unable to offer any solution at all. |
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