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The following notice was recently published by the Hungarian Central Authority concerning adoptions from Hungary. The US DOS website does not currently contain information on adoption from Hungary. If you are a prospective adoptive family currently working with an agency and hoping to adopt a young child (under 8) from Hungary, you may wish to forward this notice to your agency"

Information for the prospective adoptive parents about the number of the applications the Hungarian Central Authority can accept in 2009:

"The Hungarian Parliament ratified the Hague Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in respect of Intercountry Adoption in 2005.

The Hungarian Central Authority has been dealing with intercountry adoptions since October 2005 and according to the three years long experience, the number of the children, their age and health status as well as the high number of the applicants being registered in the international registry the Central Authority determines how many applications they will accept in 2009.

The Central Authority is responsible for the applicants. We informed the accredited bodies several times the last months that there is almost no chance of adopting healthy children younger than 6 years old and in spite of this fact, we received applications wishing a healthy child under 6 even in the last days. There are more than 100 prospective adoptive parents in our registry who want to adopt a healthy child or a child with small, correctable problem under six. So far in 2008 we could only help three international adoptions of children with these characteristics. (There were some other young children, but they had older siblings.) There are plenty of applicants waiting in Hungary and the children under 6 can be adopted in Hungary as well.

According to the above mentioned facts, we do not accept applications in 2009 that are for the adoption of healthy children under 8 years old.

We accept 10 applications from every accredited body (competent authority) that are

* for the adoption of a child (or siblings) above 8.

We accept 5 applications from every accredited body(competent authority) that are

* for the adoption of a mentally disabled or ill child who is under 8.

We accept 5 applications from every accredited body (competent authority) that are

* for the adoption of minimum three siblings.

Regarding the fact that there are a lot of couples waiting in our registry, and according to the Hungarian rules the couples are privileged, therefore we do not accept applications from singles as we do not see any chance that they could adopt from Hungary.

Besides these we do not wish to start cooperation with any new country or accredited body in 2009 regarding the high number of the applications and the low number of the adoptable children in our registry.

We will look through our registry every year and we will inform You at the end of every year about the applications we can accept in the future."

Szociális és Munkaügyi Minisztérium - Information for the prospective adoptive parents about the number of the applications the Hungarian Central Authority can accept in 2009