The country has relaunched a fact-finding commission into its past human rights violations, with a key focus on the extensive fraud and malfeasance that corrupted the nation’s historic foreign adoption programme.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the third in the country’s history, began accepting new cases yesterday, months after the previous one’s mandate ended in November with more than 2,100 complaints unresolved.
The new commission will inherit those cases, including 311 submissions by Korean adoptees from the West that were either deferred or incompletely reviewed before the second commission halted a landmark investigation into adoptions in April last year, following internal disputes over which cases warranted recognition as problematic.
Advocates say interest among adoptees is far higher this time, with hundreds already seeking investigations, including many from the United States, who were underrepresented in the previous inquiry even though American parents were by far the biggest recipients of Korean children over the past seven decades.
But investigators who served on the previous commission said it could take months – possibly until May or June – for the new probes to actually get underway.
South Korea sent thousands of children annually to the West from the 1970s to the early 2000s, peaking at an average of more than 6,000 a year in the 1980s.
The country was then ruled by a military government that saw population growth as a major threat to its economic goals and treated adoptions as a way to reduce the number of mouths to feed, contributing to what’s now possibly the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees.
The suspension of the prior adoption probe in 2025 followed a nearly three-year review of cases across Europe, the United Sates and Australia, during which the second commission confirmed human rights violations in just 56 of 367 complaints filed by adoptees.
Still, the commission issued a significant interim report concluding that the government bears responsibility for a foreign adoption programme riddled with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and carried out by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins. — AP
