KEY POINTS:
The actress Angelina Jolie, already a mother to three children born in three different countries, has applied to adopt a yet another child from a fourth country with her partner Brad Pitt.
Vu Duc Long, head of Vietnam's International Adoption Department, said he had received an application from the American actress a few days ago asking for "permission" to adopt.
"We consider her like any other American who wants to adopt children from Vietnam," Vu Duc Long said.
"It will take a few months for us to consider this," he added.
Jolie and Pitt already have three children; five-year-old Maddox, adopted from Cambodia; 2-year-old daughter Zahara, adopted from Ethiopia; and another daughter, Shiloh, who was born to the couple in Namibia in 2006.
The actress has tattoos of the latitude and longitude of the birthplaces of her three children.
Earlier this year, Jolie expressed her wish for a fourth child.
"It's, you know, another boy, another girl, which country, which race would fit best with the kids." she told CNN in June.
Jolie first became personally aware of worldwide humanitarian crises while filming Tomb Raider in Cambodia.
After the adoption of her son Maddox from the country in 2002, concerns arose that the Cambodian adoption process may not have allowed for proper consent from birth parents.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom have now placed a bar on adoptions from Cambodia in 2004.
Applications to adopt children from abroad have increased dramatically since stars such as Jolie, Brad Pitt and Madonna began adopting children from orphanages in developing countries.
When Madonna was criticised for speeding the adoption of a one-year-old boy from Malawi in 2006, Jolie spoke out.
'Personally, I prefer to stay on the right side of the law. I would never take a child away from a place where adoption is illegal.' she told French magazine Gaia.
Jolie and Pitt, 43, visited the Tam Binh orphanage on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City in November last year.
Their pictures were splashed across the front page of Vietnamese newspapers, showing the couple cruising around Ho Chi Minh City on a motorbike.
- INDEPENDENT
