And what about the people who support this action, who are thinking that this is someone who is taking direct action, they have the means to do it, and actually it's going to give this child a wonderful start in life?
Well, there are a number of issues. The first is that there seems to be an assumption going around that a life in the West is better than a life in Africa and I think we are not in any place to make that assumption. I have colleagues from Zimbabwe and Zambia who grew up there and they certainly would not concur with that opinion. So that is something we need to look at.
Also we know that children who have been separated from their birth families are those most vulnerable to abuse, to exploitation, to neglect. We know that most times the birth family is the best place for a child. They can offer the best protection and the long-term commitment to provide for their care.
So we need to be seeking ways of keeping children with their families where that is possible.
If this is becoming a trend what kind of impact is this going to have on these communities which are likely to be 'targeted' as it were for child adoption by Westerners?
There's a couple of answers. One of them is not much unfortunately because you can only adopt one or two children at a time. And as I said, there's currently 12 million orphans in Sub-Sahara. So just going through adoption doesn't actually help that many children. It is not a long-term, sustainable solution for African children in these communities. That is why we would advocate a better solution than that - actually developing the communities to be able to look after the children themselves.
The other answer is that there is a danger that these communities could be seen as places where children are easily available. Obviously there are many child protection issues that come with that. Not everyone who is looking for a child oversees is looking for them to care for them but to exploit them. We have to be very careful about painting children as commodities and saying these children are available for fees to pay.
In the majority of cases people want to look after the child out of a desire to do good but we know that is not always the case.
So what kind of strategy are you going to be pursuing now to respond to this?
We are going to be keeping our eye on the case. One of our main concerns is that the legislation that is in place in Malawi doesn't seem to have been followed. There seems to have been an exception to the rule in Madonna's case. So that is something we are going to continue to challenge.
As far as I'm aware the UK Government here can only let the child in to the country if they are happy that the correct procedures have been followed. Obviously they are in a legal sense but the spirit of the legislation that has been put in place hasn't been followed because it's been contravened so we may look at challenging the UK Government to its response to this adoption but we are in very early stages in terms of where we think we will go and we will continue monitoring the case.
