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Madonna Adoption Ruling Still on Hold

Mon., Nov. 20, 2006 4:59 PM PST by Natalie Finn

At the rate this is going, Madonna is going to be buying her adopted son his first car before she knows whether the people questioning the arrangement have a leg to stand on.

Malawi's High Court postponed a hearing for the fourth time Monday on whether a host of activist groups can challenge the legality of the Material Girl's adoption of 14-month-old David Banda.

Lilongwe High Court registrar Ken Manda said that Judge Andrew Nyirenda, who he explained was out of the area attending a conference, will issue a ruling on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

"The judge has not communicated to me or my colleague but we hear that he is very busy and he might rule next week," attorney Justin Dzonzi told Reuters. Dzonzi represents the Human Rights Consultative Committee, made up of 67 advocacy organizations looking to challenge the adoption.

And as if 67 angry watchdogs weren't enough of a daunting prospect, Nyirenda is also expected to rule on whether the Malawi Human Rights Commission will be allowed to join the suit, which was filed to investigate whether Madonna received special treatment because of her mega-celebrity status.

"Malawi laws are clear that international adoptions are prohibited and that adoptive parents have to be resident in Malawi during the period of assessment," Maswell Matewere, executive director of advocacy group Eye of the Child, told the Associated Press.

Although the adoption saga seems like it's been in the headlines forever, it was only last month that the pop icon and hubby Guy Ritchie confirmed that they were adopting David from a Malawi orphanage, where the little boy had been living for most of his life. (His father, 32-year-old Yohane Banda, had placed his son there about a month after his wife died, feeling he couldn't provide for David himself. The couple's two other sons had died in infancy of malaria.)

Madonna has in turn gone on a media blitz since then (Oprah, Time magazine, et al.) to defend her position.

The adoption-opposition proceedings were first scheduled for Oct. 20, but put on hold for a week to give the country's attorney general more time to confer with Malawi's Ministry of Gender, Child Welfare and Community Services, which is maintaining that the letter of the law was followed before Madonna was able to become a mother of three.

Then, on Oct. 27, the hearing was postponed for another two weeks, so that the judge could hear more from all parties involved. The proceedings were hung up for a third time Nov. 13, when the Human Rights Commission petitioned to get in on the action.

Which brings us to the fourth delay, a little more than a month after Nyirenda granted Madonna and Ritchie an interim adoption, which allowed them to bring David to live with them and their two children, six-year-old Rocco and 10-year-old Lourdes, in London.

"As far as we are concerned, the Ritchies followed Malawian laws to the letter," the family's attorney in Africa, Alan Chinula, told the AP, calling the stipulation requiring adoptive parents to take up residency in the country "archaic, impractical and unrealistic."

Meanwhile, Yohane Banda, who, according to Madonna, refused her initial offer of financial aid to help raise David, has remarried. On Friday he wed 22-year-old Flora Kamanga, who is three months pregnant.