Don Leo Raphael Ozigi, kidnapped on Sunday 27 March and released on 8 April.

Father Joseph Akete Bako, kidnapped on the night of 8 March in an assault to the parish house. Killed by his captors between 18 and 20 April.

«It is with a heavy heart, but with total submission to the will of God, that we announce the death of Rev. Fr. Joseph Aketeh Bako, which took place in the hands of his abductors between 18th and 20th of April 2022». Thus the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Kaduna, Fr Christian Okewu Emmanuel, announced the death of the parish priest of the Catholic church of St. John, in Kudenda, in the state of Kaduna.
Fr Bako, 48, was kidnapped by armed men who attacked the rectory at 1.30 am on the night of 8 March. His brother had also been kidnapped with him. «His brother was killed in his presence and as a result of this, his condition (he had been ill for some time) worsened and he died».
“We haven’t recovered the body, but we have confirmation of the death. The people who were kidnapped with him saw him die».
In the weeks following the kidnapping, rumors had spread of tortures inflicted to Fr. Bako by the kidnappers.

And we learn from the Fides agency of the latest kidnapping. Fr Alphonsus Uboh, pastor of the church of San Pio X, in the state of Akwa Ibom, in southern Nigeria, was kidnapped on Sunday 8 May while he was in his parish. Witnesses reported that gunmen riding motorcycles stormed parish premises after Mother’s Day and a fundraising event celebrations.
On the afternoon of 9 May, the priest managed to contact the president of the parish council saying that he was being held in a forest of which he did not know the location and that his kidnappers were demanding a ransom of 100 million Nigerian naira ($ 240,000) for his own release.

A worrying phenomenon that of kidnappings for extortion, which led the Nigerian Senate to approve a bill, still to be discussed in the House of Representatives before being approved and signed by the Head of State, who punishes with imprisonment of at least 15 years who pays a ransom to free a kidnapped person and with the death penalty the kidnapper, in the event of the death of the victims.

For years, the Nigerian bishops have prohibited the payment of ransoms in the event of the kidnapping of members of ecclesiastical and religious staff, but the bill has caused strong controversy in the country, behind it lies the inability of the institutions to guarantee the safety of citizens.

Emmanuele Di Leo: «Witnessing, albeit beyond a screen, the carnage that often inflicts this country is devastating. However, I am even more saddened when the ones dying are peacemakers such as international cooperators or priests, men who know and accept the risk of becoming the target of a ferocity that only hate or extreme poverty can explain.
The true peacemakers accept this risk so that everything that is taken for granted in our home, such as peace, education or health, becomes granted also in those territories».

Jennifer Lahl, CBC President, and Gary Powell, European Special Consultant at the CBC, wrote to the attention of Special Rapporteur Mama Fatima Singhateh, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:

«International commercial surrogacy tourism is an intrinsically harmful practice to the babies purchased in respect of the high-risk pregnancies and the increased risk that the neonate will suffer health detriments, the emotional abuse caused when a neonate is taken immediately from his or her birth mother, and the child’s exposure to genealogical bewilderment resulting from biological and cultural uncoupling, all of which are associated with the surrogacy process».

And given this necessary premise, they continue:

«Once commercial surrogacy agencies and the other professional facilitators, such as surrogacy and IVF clinics, lawyers, and doctors, have completed their specialist obligations to the commissioning parents and received their remuneration, their involvement in the process comes to an abrupt end. Shortly after they are born, the babies are often taken abroad, to the homeland of the commissioning parents, where commercial surrogacy is likely to be illegal or considerably more expensive: factors that motivate commissioning parents to seek commercial surrogacy services abroad».

And here is the serious denunciation. Lahl and Powell explain that when children are brought overseas, surrogacy agencies do not have the burden of investigating what will happen to the children from then on and whether the acquiring parents had nefarious intentions. Surrogacy agencies do not carry out any kind of rigorous suitability screening of intending parents, unlike what happens in the adoption process. The conflict of interests is too strong!

A tragic emblematic case is that of “Baby Gammy” in 2014, where a boy with Down’s syndrome was left behind in Thailand by his commissioning parents who returned to Australia with Gammy’s twin sister, Pipah. The commissioning biological father had previously served three years in prison for sexual offenses on minors and, despite this, he had managed to complete the process of buying the child. It is useless to dwell on the pain caused to an abandoned disabled child because he does not correspond to the product chosen in the catalog.

The text underlines: «The fact that these children are purchased in one country and transported to another, with no follow-up monitoring, means that they are at an especially high risk of abuse and exploitation once they are taken abroad. Indeed, the purchasing parents may even have no biological relationship to the child at all, given that both the egg and the sperm that form the embryo can be purchased under some jurisdictions. This is a situation that would seem particularly attractive to malevolent traffickers of children, though numerous examples of adults exploiting children to whom they are biologically related suggest that such abuse is by no means ruled out simply because an adult has a biological relationship to the child».

«The birth mothers recruited in commercial surrogacy are often women from economically-disadvantaged backgrounds, and in this respect, there is a clear parallel with the sale of human organs, where the “donor” (vendor) is normally in a situation of economic vulnerability – and even urgency and desperation».

As also reiterated by us at Steadfast in a document sent to all international cooperation bodies, this inhumane practice must be stopped by all means. The paper sent was used to warn of these illicit trafficking that makes the human being a commodity at the service of a ruthless market.

The parallelism with the organ trafficking immediately brings to mind the recent intervention of Michela Marzano, philosopher and former exponent of the Democratic Party, in the daily newspaper La Stampa. Like all surrogacy defenders, she believes she can repair the tragic consequences of this practice by legalizing it and making it free and voluntary “as it happens when you donate an organ”. Apart from the fact that the legalization of a crime seems to us at least a contradiction in terms and comparing a human being to an organ a shame, the number of women who really freely choose to lend their uterus for free and in a purely altruistic way is small. The reality is another and concerns women in extreme economic difficulty, forced to sell their eggs or rent their uterus to eat or keep their biological children, even where the salary is masked by a fake and substantial reimbursement of expenses.

It is urgent that governments act quickly to make this nefarious practice an international crime.

According to the latest UN data, since February 24, a total of 2,952,026 refugees have crossed the Ukrainian border to seek refuge abroad. The overwhelming majority of the people arrived in Poland (almost 1.8 million refugees), followed by Romania (over 422,000) and Moldova (almost 340,000). In Italy over 44 thousand.

Even as Ernesto Caffo, child neuropsychiatrist and founder of Telefono Azzurro recently stated, in the large and daily flow of people fleeing Ukraine, all checks are being skipped, for example those of biometric analyzes, the collection of documents and digital fingerprints, thus risking cases of child abduction, which will be subject to trafficking, also aimed at illicit adoptions.

In particular, we are talking about children who already lived in a situation of hardship in Ukraine, because they were disabled and left by poor families in dedicated structures, such as orphanages.

We fully share the fears of Caffo, who is now in Poland: “We see children getting into cars and disappearing.”

“The non-profit world and associations must avoid acting at random”. Senseless fundraisers or buses leaving to Italy for just little more than three children increase media visibility, but do not help the cause.

Even during the recent presentation of the public and pre-political Agenda “Say it from the rooftops”, our President Emmanuele Di Leo had affirmed the urgent need for a serious coordination among Europe, the Italian government, UNHCR and associations, coordination which is now lacking and which is the cause of the absence of the protocols in the controls we have described above. We must act now, afterwards it will be too late.

In December 2019, William was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease, steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome. He underwent frequent home dialysis, which stopped working in September last year.

It was then that the doctors, instead of proposing William and his mother to be placed on the waiting list for kidney transplant, began to talk about palliative care for the first time. “There was a huge meeting and I begged them to give him a chance. I had to beg … I was crying, I was absolutely heartbroken. I don’t see why I should have had to fight for everything everyone else is entitled to”.

Who’s telling this story is William’s mother, Amy McLennan, who obviously did not give up on the decision of the doctors. If she had done so, William would have been sent home in September, received palliative care, and died. But last week, after a series of hearings, a high court judge ruled that a transplant was in William’s best interest.

William’s story has brought to light, the family’s lawyers say, a wider and more serious reality about the type of medical treatment given to autistic people and people with learning disabilities. “If he was a ‘neurotypical’ child, he would already have had a transplant or been on the transplant list”.

According to the doctors, William is a complex medical case, while for Amy he is nothing more than a kind and helpful boy, always available to help. He loves cleaning, he loves painting walls, he loves going for walks. He loves school, he loves loud music, he loves Michael Jackson, Annie Lennox, Fleetwood Mac.

We learned about William’s case 20 days ago, when everyone was hoping for the sentence for his near future. For once, justice has run its course. William will have the right, like everyone in his situation, to be placed on the transplant list. This does not mean he will surely find a donor but that he will have the same chances as anyone and it’s not small thing. The transplant will extend its life by at least 15/20 years and it is clear that the best interest can never be death.
In the UK, some associations have also taken action to look for a living donor, someone who will take care of William and make himself available to check any compatibility.

This is one of the 3 families who arrived in Italy, escaped from the Taliban invasion of their city.
In the short time the Taliban took control of all facilities, whoever managed to get on the last departing plane, could do so. And so did J., with his wife and two daughters, before Mujib was born. His brother wanted to do this too, but he couldn’t: “He has children in wheelchairs who could not get on the plane, so he stayed there to protect them and entrusted me with the only one who could move and take the plane with us. , the 11-year-old nephew.
“I used to work in the jewellery industry” explains J. “I also worked with Americans“. I decided to leave, it was a matter of life or death, J. is what is defined in the jargon as a sensitive target. The Taliban would never “forgive” this contact with the Western world.
The first thing J. seeks in his future is “documents”. Then, “I want to learn Italian well”. Third, work. With the documents all right and fluen Italian, the next step is “starting a new company”. Thus, together with his family, life can resume.

«In the long interview of which we shared only a small part, this father speaks of his last born as “a joy that cannot be explained”. It is incredible how even in front of terrible realities such as war or terrorism, life can prevail and, with it, happiness” is the comment of the president of Steadfast Emmanuele Di Leo.

One day last week, a pregnant surrogate mother in Ukraine called a lawyer with an anomalous request: If war broke out, could the biological parents of the unborn child be able to force her to leave the country? They wanted her to go to nearby Georgia for the rest of her pregnancy. However, she would not leave her children.

Sergeiy Antonov, a Ukrainian lawyer, said he was contacted by at least two couples with the same request. “Surrogate mothers – he explained – have their own children and cannot leave them to move to another country.” The contracts they have signed, however, could foresee this.

Let’s go back to the initial question: what will happen to children already born and waiting to be collected?
You will probably remember what happened during the 2020 lockdown, when the specialised centre for assisted procreation Biotexcom had literally parked over 60 children born from surrogacy in the Hotel Venezia in Kiev, used as an extempiraneous nursery, awaiting the release for international arrivals of the client couples.

But now it is war and entire families are trying to leave the country, mothers and fathers are trying to bring their children to safety.
But what will it be of these children if the commissioning parents cannot reach them?

Don’t worry, Biotexcom guarantees their safety and business even in war. It’s of the day before the Russian attack a video published by the company itself of a fallout shelter where children would have been kept in case of war. The clinic ensured that surrogacy activities in Ukraine continued regularly, “there is no reason to panic, neither for Ukrainians nor for foreigners here”. The clinic also said it was “very grateful to those who are confirming embryo transfers” in Kiev.

An unprecedented violence that of surrogacy, which deeply wounds not only the mother, who is exploited and bought, but also the child, the subject of a contract that will deprive him forever of his fundamental right to remain with both biological parents.
Today this crime takes on even more tragic aspects.

The Suicide Act of 1961 establishes criminal liability for complicity in the suicide of others if an act is carried out to encourage or assist in the suicide or attempted suicide of another person.

Now, the Assisted Dying Bill, sponsored by Baroness Meacher, president of Dignity in Dying, would allow terminally ill adults to receive, at their request, specific assistance to end their lives, thus allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs.

This was the speech by Cardinal Vincent Nichols, president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, by Anglican leader Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who spoke in the Second Reading debate of the Bill in the House of Lords:

“We are conscious of the risks and dangers entailed in the provisions of the Bill and the ‘real-life’ practical inadequacies of the proposed safeguards”
“By the faiths we profess, we hold every human life to be a precious gift of the Creator, to be upheld and protected.
All people of faith, and those of none, can share our concern that the common good is not served by policies or actions that would place very many vulnerable people in more vulnerable positions”. They continued: “We appeal to people of whatever faith or belief to join us through our common bond of humanity in caring for the most vulnerable people within our society”.

“In contrast to the proposals in this Bill, we continue to call for measures to make high-quality palliative care available to all at the end of their lives.”

“We believe that the aim of a compassionate society should be assisted living rather than an acceptance of assisted suicide.”

Opponents of the bill include nearly 1,700 doctors who wrote an open letter to Sajid Javid, UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Affairs, warning him that the bill would effectively turn doctors into murderers and that it would be impossible for any government to draft assisted suicide laws that include legal protection from the future extension and expansion of such laws.

The Bill would undermine public trust in doctors and send a clear message to frail, elderly and disabled patients about the value society places on them as people and they added: “We would not take patients’ lives – even if they asked us to – but for the sake of us all, and for future generations, we ask that the law remains unchanged”.

“As we know, even in Italy there is a great risk that assisted suicide will be legalised. Offering dignity to a sick person even in the terminal phase of life does not mean giving him death as the only way out. For years, palliative care has eliminated the pain of patients suffering from serious diseases. We need a Health Service that is able to guarantee adequate care by applying Law 38/2010, or palliative care “intended for a fragile patient or suffering from an incurable and chronic disease”, as stated in the final document 10/04/19 of the investigation of the XII Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, approved unanimously. This is what it takes and Steadfast has strongly affirmed it for years. After the battles we have undertaken for the little Charlie, Isaiah and Alfie, as for the other 24 cases followed, we reiterate that the way forward is that of care, assistance and not that of death », affirms our president Emmanuele Di Leo.

The state of Sokoto is one of the most affected states, where the bandits take advantage of the vast areas of land that are not patrolled along the border with the neighboring country of Niger. It is a “very difficult time” for Nigeria, said the governor of Sokoto, adding that the country is “plagued by many security challenges in the area, in particular banditry, kidnapping and other associated crimes”.

A carnage that does not seem to give respite to this land! The latest massacre occurred on the night of Sunday 26 September, when a commando of Fulani shepherds attacked the villages of Madamai and Abun in the Kaura area in the northern state of Kaduna for two hours. 34 people were killed, including many women and children, some burned alive in their homes.

“They shot everything that moved”, declared a priest anonymously, “it was not an attack, but a massacre of Christians”.

According to the Nigerian NGO Intersociety Rule of Law (https://intersociety-ng.org/an-international-report-3462-christians-hacked-to-death-by-nigerian-jihadists-in-200-days-3000-abducted -300-churches-and-ten-priests-attacked /) “The number of defenseless Christians hacked to death by Nigeria’s Islamic Jihadists and their collaborators in the security forces in the past 200 days or 1st January to 18th July 2021 has risen to no fewer than 3, 462 and this is just sixty-eight deaths less than the total deaths of Nigerian Christians in 2020”.
And also, 3000 faithful kidnapped, 300 churches attacked, ten attacks on priests ended with a murder or kidnapping.