Russian Officials Call for Ban on Adoptions by U.S. Citizens

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
The new law, signed by President Obama last week, bars those accused of rights abuses from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other financial assets in the country. It infuriated Russian officials, including President Vladimir V. Putin, who pledged to retaliate.

Mr. Putin voiced support last week for a plan to impose comparable sanctions on United States judges and others accused of having violated the rights of Russian children adopted by Americans. On Friday, the lower house of Parliament approved the first version of such a bill.

But some lawmakers are now pushing an amendment that would ban all adoptions of Russian children by American citizens. A vote could come as soon as Wednesday.

Even some senior Russian officials have said the measure is too drastic, including the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the education minister, Dmitry Livanov.

The conflicting views highlight the challenge the Kremlin is facing in formulating a response to the American law.

“We cannot ban American bureaucrats from traveling to Russia because in general they don’t come here,” said Dmitry Gudkov, a member of Parliament who voted against the amendment in committee. “They don’t have bank accounts here; they don’t buy property.”

Critics of the amendment said it would punish Russian orphans. Some news accounts described it as denying needy children a chance at the “American dream.” One political cartoon showed a Russian official holding a child in a chokehold.

Americans have adopted more than 45,000 Russian children since 1999, according to State Department statistics, with a high of 5,862 in 2004. The numbers have dwindled in recent years, though, to 962 in 2011. Even so, Russia is the third most popular country for adoptions by Americans, behind China and Ethiopia.

The American law was named for Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after trying to expose government tax fraud. He was said to have been denied proper medical care.

Russian lawmakers named their bill after Dmitri Yakovlev, a toddler who died in Virginia in July 2008 after his adoptive father left him in a parked car for nine hours.

The father, Miles Harrison, was acquitted of manslaughter by Judge R. Terrence Ney of Fairfax County Circuit Court, who ruled that while Mr. Harrison was negligent, he had not shown “callous disregard for human life.”

Judge Ney said in a telephone interview that he would regret not having the chance to visit Russia, but he did not seem overly bothered by the possibility of being barred from the country.

“When you are reading the travel section,” Judge Ney said he told his wife the other day, “you can jump over it when you get to Russia.” He said that they had long talked of visiting St. Petersburg and Moscow, to see St. Basil’s Cathedral and the land of Dostoyevsky. “We’re not going to make that trip,” he said. “It’s just that simple.”

As for the death of Dmitri Yakovlev, Judge Ney said the child’s nationality was not a factor. “The case would have been decided in the same way,” he said. “It was just this terrible, terrible tragedy.”

Sporadic cases of abuse, even deaths, of adopted Russian children in the United States have inflamed Russian public opinion. Tensions soared in 2010 after a 7-year-old boy was sent alone on a flight back to Russia by his adoptive mother from Tennessee.

Russia threatened to ban adoptions after that case, but the two countries reached an agreement on heightened oversight that allowed them to continue.

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