The South Korea Truth and Reconciliation Commission yesterday said that the South Korean government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and enabled by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins.
The report follows a nearly three-year investigation into complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, the US and Australia, representing the most comprehensive examination yet of South Korea’s foreign adoptions, which peaked under a succession of military governments in the 1970s and 1980s.
The commission, a government-appointed fact-finding panel, said that it completed investigations into 56 complaints and aims to review the remaining cases before its mandate expires in late May.
Photo: AP
The commission’s findings broadly aligned with previous reporting by The Associated Press (AP).
The AP investigations, which were also documented by Frontline, detailed how South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply about 200,000 South Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence that many were being procured through questionable or outright unscrupulous means.
Western nations ignored the problems and sometimes pressured South Korea to keep the children coming as they focused on satisfying their huge domestic demands for babies.
The commission recommended that the Seoul issue an official apology over the problems it identified and develop plans to address the grievances of adoptees who discovered that the biological origins in their adoption papers were falsified.
It also urged the government to investigate citizenship gaps among adoptees sent to the US — the largest recipient of South Korean children by far — and to implement measures to assist those without citizenship, who might number in the thousands.
South Korea’s government has never acknowledged direct responsibility for issues surrounding adoptions, which have drawn growing international attention amid criticism that thousands of children were carelessly or unnecessarily separated from their biological families.
The South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, the department that handles adoption issues, did not immediately comment on the commission’s report.
Some adoptees criticized the report, saying that it did not establish the government’s complicity strongly enough and that its recommendations were too weak.
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