The country’s truth commission has concluded that the government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption programme 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 landmark report released yesterday followed a nearly three-year investigation into complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, the United States, 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 ‘80s.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government-appointed fact-finding panel, says it completed investigations into 56 complaints and aims to review the remaining cases before its mandate expires in late May.
The commission’s findings broadly aligned with previous reporting by The Associated Press.
The investigations, which were also documented by Frontline (PBS), detailed how South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence that many were being procured through questionable or outright unscrupulous means.
Western nations ignored these problems and sometimes pressured South Korea to keep the kids coming as they focused on satisfying their huge domestic demands for babies.
The commission recommended the South Korean government 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 United States – the largest recipient of Korean children by far – and to implement measures to assist those without citizenship, who may number in the thousands.
South Korea’s government has never acknowledged direct responsibility for issues surrounding past adoptions, which have drawn growing international attention amid criticism that thousands of children were carelessly or unnecessarily separated from their biological families.
The health and welfare ministry, the government department that handles adoption issues, didn’t immediately comment on the commission’s report.
Some adoptees criticised the report, saying it doesn’t establish the government’s complicity strongly enough and that its recommendations were too weak. — AP
