Roelie Post, born 25 December 1959 in the north of the Netherlands, is a political scientist and a civil servant of the European Commission from 1983. Before Brussels she worked for the Dutch national housing association. Inside the Commission she was in DG Agriculture when, in 1999, she was given a new kind of job: task manager for the Romanian Children File and minorities, in DG Enlargement.

Nobody at the Commission had worked on child rights before. She became its first child-rights expert. The legal basis was the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The task was to support Romania in reforming a broken child-protection system so the country could join the European Union.

The market

From 1999 until 2005 she worked on that reform. Tens of thousands of children had been sent out of Romania in the 1990s. In 2001 the Romanian government shut intercountry adoption down. The lobby that lived off it — agencies, adoptive parents, politicians in Paris, Rome and Washington — treated that decision as a threat. If one poor country could stop the trade, others might follow.

Post’s own account is blunt. The system in place was a market for children, riddled with corruption. When the laws were redrafted, Romania’s reformed child protection had neither place nor need for intercountry adoption. The Romanian government, with EU support, stood firm and stopped exporting its children. Romania joined the Union in 2007.

Removed from the file

Pressure from outside and inside the EU meant she could no longer work on children’s rights inside the Commission. Colleagues stopped speaking to her. She was given work with nothing in it. Outside the institution she has described being followed, having her house broken into, and having her car stolen. The Commission’s medical service tried to have her declared psychologically unfit. Its security service, she has said, would speak to her and then neither protect her nor investigate.

In 2007 she published Romania For Export Only. In 2008 Secretary-General Catherine Day proposed that she set up an NGO, with her EU salary and status continued. That organisation was Against Child Trafficking. On her own site she describes it as a place to park her for some years, because the adoption lobby had taken important positions in the Commission and the Parliament. With Arun Dohle she worked on cases in Australia, China, India, the European Union, Ethiopia and Malawi, including the court challenge to Madonna’s adoption of Mercy.

The secondment ended on 1 August 2014. Reintegration did not work. She received what she calls the classical whistleblower treatment and was ostracised. She blew the whistle on several occasions. Despite that, the European Commission fired her in August 2018.

The Hague and The Hague

On 30 July 2018 Pieter Omtzigt put fourteen parliamentary questions to the Dutch minister of foreign affairs. On 4 September 2019 the House of Representatives unanimously adopted his motion asking the Dutch government to work with First Vice-President Frans Timmermans towards a solution for both the whistleblower and the adoption issue.

Because the Commission did not cooperate, Prime Minister Mark Rutte sent her to the Dutch House for Whistleblowers. At the end of 2021 the House concluded that she had blown the whistle, and that the Commission had not applied its own rules. It advised the Commission to review the decision to dismiss her.

At the beginning of 2023 the Commission refused to review its position. It still does not formally recognise her as a whistleblower. Under the Commission’s internal guidelines the last administrative step was the EU Presidency. She wrote to the Belgian Presidency asking for protection. Six months later the reply was that the Presidency did not see how it could protect an EU civil-servant whistleblower.

The only route left, on her account, is court.

Why it still matters

Her argument has never been only about one dismissal. She says the same chain that was stopped in Romania moved to Poland, Ethiopia, Malawi and elsewhere: demand from countries with falling birth rates, agencies that need supply, and papers that turn children with families into “orphans”. A Dutch advisory council later recommended stopping intercountry adoption from the Netherlands. Flanders has moved the same way. She argues the Hague Adoption Convention protects the industry, not the child, and that half-measures in new adoption laws leave that structure standing.