South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission will investigate the cases of many South Korean adoptees in Europe and the United States who suspect their origins were falsified or obscured during a child export frenzy in the mid- to late-1900s.

The decision on Thursday, December 8, 2022, opens what could be South Korea’s most extensive inquiry into foreign adoptions yet, after complains over broken family connections and laundered child statuses and identities increased and demanded government attention.

The adopted South Koreans are believed to be the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees. In the past six decades, about 200,000 South Koreans, mostly girls were adopted overseas.

Most were placed with white parents in the United States and Europe during the 1970s and ′80s.

After a meeting, the commission decided to investigate 34 adoptees who were sent to Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and the United States from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

The adoptees claim they were wrongfully removed from their families through falsified documents and corrupt practices.

They were among the 51 adoptees who first submitted their applications to the commission in August, 2022 through the Danish Korean Rights Group, led by Adoptee Attorney, Peter Møller.

Møller revealed that the applications filed by his group have since grown to over 300, and dozens of adoptees from Sweden and Australia are also expected to file applications on Friday, December 9, 2022 which is the commission’s deadline for investigation requests.

Any findings by the commission could be used by adoptees to sue the adoption agencies or the government for damages.

The investigation will likely expand over the next few months as the commission reviews whether to accept the applications submitted after August.

Cases that are seen as similar will likely be fused to speed up the investigations.

The commission disclosed that its decision to investigate the 34 cases came after it confirmed through records that the adoptees were sent to the West through manipulated records that falsely described them as orphans despite the existence of biological parents, or faked their identities by borrowing the details of a third person.

Adoptees are also calling for a full opening of their records and have asked South Korea’s government to prevent any destruction or altercation of documents kept by the country’s four adoption agencies.

During that time, the country was ruled by a succession of military leaders who saw adoptions as a way to deepen ties with the democratic West while reducing the number of mouths to feed and removing the socially undesirable.

Those procured for adoptions during the 1970s and ’80s were mostly children of poor families who ended up in orphanages and those of unwed mothers pressured into relinquishing their newborns at hospitals.

Special Adoption Law Allowed Agencies To Manipulate Records

South Korea’s special adoption law allowed profit-driven agencies to manipulate records and bypass proper child relinquishment.

Most of the South Korean adoptees sent abroad were registered by agencies as legal orphans found abandoned on the streets, a designation that made the adoption process quicker and easier.

However, many of the so-called orphans had relatives who could be easily identified and found.

Some of the adoptees say they discovered that the agencies had switched their identities to replace other children who died or got too sick to travel, which made it impossible to trace their roots.

The adoptees called for the commission to broadly investigate agencies for records falsification and manipulation and for allegedly proceeding with adoptions without the proper consent of birth parents.

They want the commission to establish whether the government was responsible for the corrupt practices and whether adoptions were fueled by increasingly larger payments and donations from adoptive parents that could have motivated agencies to create their own supply.

South Korea’s government has never acknowledged responsibility over the human rights problems surrounding its foreign adoptions.

However, Multiple records describing policy meetings between Health Ministry officials and agency representatives in the 1980s reveal that officials were aware that the country’s adoption system was exposing children to the risk of trafficking.

The government didn’t employ meaningful measures to eliminate what officials described as “intake problems,” including payments agencies provided to hospitals and orphanages for the children they collected.

The special adoption law revised during the 1970s granted the heads of agencies extensive guardianship rights, including the ability to place children with foreign parents without the supervision of courts.

The adoption law is still in place but in 2013, South Korea’s government began requiring foreign adoptions to go through family courts.