Nearly 300 adoptees demand South Korea probe their adoptions
- About 200,000 South Koreans were adopted overseas during the past six decades, mainly to white parents in the United States and Europe
- Denmark-based group called on President Yoon Suk-yeol to prevent agencies from destroying records related to foreign adoptions, alleging falsified records
Peter Møller, attorney and co-head of the Danish Korean Rights Group, speaks during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea in August 2022. Dozens of South Korean adoptees who were sent to Danish parents as children in the 1970s and ‘80s have formally demanded that the South Korean government investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions, which they say were corrupted by systemic practices that falsified or obscured children’s origins. Photo: APNearly 300 South Koreans who were adopted by European and American parents as children have so far filed applications demanding South Korea’s government investigate their adoptions, which they suspect were based on falsified documents that laundered their real status or identities as agencies raced to export children.
The Denmark-based group representing the adoptees also called for South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol to prevent agencies from destroying records as they face increasing scrutiny about their practices during a foreign adoption boom that peaked in the 1980s.
The 283 applications submitted to Seoul’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission through Tuesday describe numerous complaints about lost or distorted biological origins, underscoring a deepening rift between the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees and their birth nation decades after scores of Korean children were carelessly removed from their families.
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Peter Møller, lawyer and co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, said he also plans to sue two Seoul-based agencies – Holt Children’s Services and Korea Social Services – over their unwillingness to fully open their records to adoptees.
While agencies often cite privacy issues related to birth parents to justify the restricted access, Møller accuses them of inventing excuses to sidestep questions about their practices as adoptees increasingly express frustration about the limited details in their adoption papers that often turn out to be inaccurate or falsified.
Last month, Møller’s group filed applications from 51 Danish adoptees calling for the commission to investigate their adoptions, which were handled by Holt and KSS.
The move attracted intense attention from Korean adoptees around the world, prompting the group to expand its campaign to Holt and KSS adoptees outside Denmark. The 232 applications additionally filed on Tuesday included 165 cases from Denmark, 36 cases from the United States, and 31 cases combined from Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Germany.
The commission, which was set up in December 2020 to investigate human rights atrocities under military governments that ruled South Korea from the 1960s to 1980s, must decide in three or four months whether to open an investigation into the applications filed by adoptees. If it does, that could possibly trigger the most far-reaching inquiry into foreign adoptions in the country, which has never fully reconciled with the child export frenzy engineered by its past military leaders.
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While the commission’s deadline for applications comes in December, Møller said his group will try to persuade the commission to accept more adoptions from adoptees on a rolling basis if it decides to investigate the cases.
“There are many more adoptees that have written us, called us, been in contact with us. They are afraid to submit to this case because they fear that the adoption agencies will … burn the original documents and retaliate,” said Møller. He said such concerns are greater among adoptees who discovered that the agencies had switched their identities to replace other children who died, got too sick to travel, or were retaken by their Korean families before they could be sent to Western adopters.
Holt and KSS didn’t immediately comment on the applications.
About 200,000 South Koreans were adopted overseas during the past six decades, mainly to white parents in the United States and Europe and mostly during the 1970s and 1980s.
South Korea’s then-military leaders saw adoptions as a way to reduce the number of mouths to feed, solve the “problem” of unwed mothers and deepen ties with the democratic West.
They established special laws aimed at promoting foreign adoptions, which effectively allowed licensed private agencies to bypass proper child relinquishment practices as they exported huge numbers of children to the West year after year.
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Most of the South Korean adoptees sent abroad were registered by agencies as legal orphans found abandoned on the streets, although they frequently had relatives who could be easily identified or found. That practice often makes their roots difficult or impossible to trace.
Some adoptees say they discovered that the agencies had switched their identities to replace other children who died or got too sick to travel, which worsens their sense of loss and sometimes leads to false reunions with relatives who turn out to be strangers.
It wasn’t until 2013 when South Korea’s government required foreign adoptions to go through family courts, ending a policy of allowing agencies to dictate child relinquishments, transfer of custody, and emigration for decades.