Dennis and Francine LeVine adopted their third child, Jack, from an orphanage in Russia in March, 1998. Dennis LeVine wrote about the experience of the Russian adoption hearing in an article printed in "The Hillsborough County Lawyer" Magazine.
A Lawyer in a Foreign Land by Dennis J. LeVine
You are an attorney licensed to practice law. Suddenly, you find yourself in a court in a foreign country, in front of a judge speaking in a foreign language. You now realize how your clients feel when they sit in court next to you and do not understand what the judge is saying, or when your clients turn to you after a hearing and ask what just happened.
I recently had such an experience, in the Russian legal system. My wife and I traveled to Russia in March 1998, to adopt a four year old boy. Under Russian law, the adopting parents must attend a formal hearing before a Russian judge in the city where the child was born so the judge can consider the adoption petition. Knowing nothing more about this procedure before we arrived in Russia, the experience turned out to be a harrowing one.
We arrived early at the courthouse in Kungur, a small town south of Perm near the Ural Mountains in Central Russia, for our prearranged morning court date. Upon arriving at the courthouse, however, we learned that the judge who was scheduled to hear our adoption case had gone to a seminar out of town. The judge apparently took with her the key to a locked cabinet which contained our file and all the original documents. This caused two problems. First, the clerk had to find another key to the cabinet. Second, a judge who had never handled an adoption proceeding was assigned to the case. The new judge advised our translator that she would need the entire morning to review the file and the law, and that we should come back at 2:30 in the afternoon.
We dutifully arrived back at the courthouse at 2:30, but the hearing did not commence. The orphanage director went into the judge's office to speak to the judge. When she came out, she was sobbing, and she and the interpreter were speaking in hushed tones in Russian. While I did not understand what they were saying, it was clear that this was not a good development. Nonetheless, we were shortly ushered into a small room where we sat across the table from the judge, the public prosecutor, two "representatives of the people," and a secretary who apparently was writing down in longhand the highlights of the proceedings (I assume that's what she was doing). Next to my wife and me sat our translator, the orphanage director, and the representative from the local "Board of Education."
We had been advised that nobody at the hearing spoke English. The judge commenced the hearing by advising us, through our translator, that in the event we did not agree with the ruling of the court, we could take an appeal to a higher court. This was certainly of little comfort, since we had plane tickets to leave Russia in less than three days. The judge then commenced to read out loud each document in our file, including the home study and the reference letters. The judge even read the Notary pages attached to several of the documents! Our translator translated for us and she also inserted her own choice comments on the proceedings. This reading went on for over an hour.
The judge then asked us to stand and present our petition. We gave a pre-arranged speech setting out the facts of our adoption (our translator had told us what we needed to say). She translated every one of our words into Russian, although I will never know whether she was actually translating what we said to the judge, or simply stating in Russian what she knew they needed to hear. In any event, when the hearing ended, the judge asked us to leave the room. We went outside and sat in the hallway and waited .... More than 45 minutes went by. We had no idea what was taking so long. We soon found out. At about 5:15, the judge finally opened the door and motioned us into her office. We stood while she read a five-page single-spaced hand-written decision, which she obviously had been working on while we were waiting in the hallway. Our translator dutifully translated. This took almost half an hour. Thankfully, at the end of her ruling the judge advised us that she had approved the adoption. Moreover, she also had agreed to waive the statutory ten-day waiting period so that we could immediately leave with our new son, who was waiting for us at the orphanage. Our translator then ushered us out of the office. As we again waited in the hallway, our translator went back into the office and had a discussion (a rather loud one) with the judge about the proper form of the adoption's final judgment which needed to be signed. Our translator convinced the judge that the form of the judgment which the judge had prepared was not correct, and had the judge sign another form of judgment which the translator had prepared. We immediately took this judgment to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Kungur, where we received the new birth certificate for our son, who we named Jack Kenneth LeVine. At that point, we were able to go back to the orphanage, pick up our son, and begin our journey home. Our prayers had been answered, and we returned to Tampa with our new son less than a week after we had arrived in Russia.
During that fateful day while I sat in the Courthouse hallway in Kungor, I thought many times of The Trial by Franz Kafka. I came to understand that the experience described in that book may not have been fictional. I continue to remember my feelings of helplessness and bewilderment during the adoption hearing. Now that I have returned to the practice of law, I try to take more time to help clients understand the steps their case will take through the legal process.
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