Why does CCAA have such a large backlog of dossier?
When international adoptions in China were opened in 1993, responsibility was shared between the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) and the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The program expanded rapidly but unevenly, in early 1996, MOJ was processing over 80% of the total dossiers which were arriving at the rate of several hundred per month. The rest were handled by a small staff at Civil Affairs. At this time, the process took about 2-3 months from submission of your dossier to travel. In late May of 1996, a decision was reached at very high levels in the Chinese government that all adoption processing would be done by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The Civil Affairs staff was forced to suspend operations, move to much larger offices, and hire and train a much larger staff. There was also a delay in transferring the existing dossiers from MOJ to Civil Affairs. The newly expanded staff was able to resume processing in late August of 1996. However, between all of the dossiers that had continued to arri
