A Swedish legal expert investigating the country’s international adoption practices yesterday said that she is trying to determine whether Swedish authorities were aware of falsified child origins when they approved the adoptions of thousands of South Korean children.
Uppsala University law professor Anna Singer spoke to The Associated Press during a week-long trip to South Korea, where she plans to meet with officials from the government and a Seoul-based agency that handled adoptions to Sweden to gather details on how South Korea procured and documented children for foreign adoptions.
Many South Korean adoptees accuse their agencies of fabricating documents to expedite adoptions by foreigners, such as falsely registering them as abandoned orphans when they had relatives who could be easily identified, making their origins difficult to trace.
Photo: AP
Most South Korean adoptees were sent overseas during the 1970s and 1980s, when Seoul was ruled by a succession of military governments that saw adoptions as a way to deepen ties with the democratic West while reducing the number of mouths to feed.
“Our primary focus is the Swedish organizations and the Swedish actors — what did they do and what did they know? But in order to get a full understanding, we also need to know how [adoptions were] organized in the countries of origin,” said Singer, who the Swedish government in 2021 appointed to lead the investigation.
She said such findings would be key to determining whether Sweden had effective safeguards or monitoring measures to ensure South Korean adoptees were not wrongfully displaced from their biological parents.
Singer’s investigation is aimed at identifying irregularities in the way Swedish government agencies, municipalities and adoption organizations handled international adoptions, which came from about 80 countries, including whether they were aware that child origins were being fabricated in the nations sending the children.
A number of European countries have begun investigating how they have conducted international adoptions, in the face of growing concerns that children were being wrongfully removed from their biological families.
While the investigations have been triggered by more recent adoptions from South America and other parts of Asia, another focus has been the thousands of children adopted from South Korea during the country’s 1970s to 1980s adoption boom, which created the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees.
Hundreds of South Korean adoptees from Europe, the US and Australia are demanding that the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions, which they say were based on documents that falsified or obscured their origins.
The commission has accepted dozens of the nearly 400 applications filed last year, and is expected to take more cases in the following months, opening what is likely to be most meaningful inquiry into South Korea’s foreign adoptions yet.
South Korea sent about 200,000 children to the West for adoptions in the past six decades, with more than half of them placed in the US. Along with France and Denmark, Sweden was a major European destination of South Korean children, adopting nearly 10,000 of them since the 1960s.
Singer said that she has no immediate plans to investigate the cases of the 21 Swedish adoptees who submitted applications to the South Korean truth commission, but was communicating with South Korean adoptee groups in Sweden while trying to establish details about systemic problems surrounding the South’s adoptions.
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