You all know how long your agency has been waiting to be accredited by Moscow, and how much paperwork it has filed. But do you know where it stands with its Hague accreditation?

Say what?

The Hague Convention on Inter-Country Adoption is a piece of international law dating from 1993. It governs the rights of children, birth parents and adoptive parents in international adoption situations. The goal is to have a clear, universally accepted set of rules for how these adoptions are going to be handled and how any disputes about them will be resolved. The United States signed the Convention in 1994 and President Bill Clinton signed the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, which governs the implementation of the Convention in the U.S. in October 2000. The U.S. is expected to ratify it by the end of this year.

Why does that affect adoption agencies? Under Hague, all U.S. agencies that handle adoptions from Russia--or any other country around the world that is a party to the Convention--have to have Hague-specific accreditation. Last fall, the U.S. State Department approved two entities-- the Council on Accreditation and the Colorado Department of Human Services--to handle this function.

There is a lot of paperwork involved. When Children's Hope International posted a press release on its Web site on June 5 announcing that it had finalized a key report needed for accreditation, it listed the names of 11 staffers that had worked on the project.

There's also a fairly substantial cost. According to the fee schedule posted by the Council on Accreditation, it can cost an agency a minimum of $7,000 to $12,000 to get accredited. The fees are based on the dollar volume of the agency's international adoption work.

What do you do about all this? Ask your agency whether it has applied for and/or received its Hague accreditation. Or check the list on the Council's Web site. Remember, this accreditation is very specific and goes above and beyond any licensing that your agency may have with the authorities in its home state. Your agency may tell you that it doesn't need its own Hague accreditation because its work is being supervised by another agency that does have Hague status. While that is technically possible, I can't help but think that there's an extra degree of comfort in an agency having its own accreditation.

What if your agency doesn't have its accreditation done by the time the U.S. ratifies Hague? The State Department has covered just about every variable on its Web site. If your agency has its application underway, you should be OK.