South Korean truth commission halts probe into adoption fraud, hundreds of cases in limbo

After a nearly three-year investigation into adoption cases across Europe, the United States, and Australia, the commission concluded in a March interim report that the government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption program riddled with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to cut welfare costs and carried out by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins.

However, some adoptees, and even members of the commission, criticized the cautiously-worded report, arguing that it should have more forcefully established the government's complicity. Disputes also arose after the commission's nine-member decision-making panel, dominated by conservative-leaning members appointed by recently ousted President Yoon Suk Yeol and his party, voted on March 25 to defer the assessments of 42 adoptee cases, citing insufficient documentation to conclusively prove the adoptions were problematic.

Commission officials haven’t disclosed which documents were central to the discussions. However, they suggested that some commissioners were hesitant to recognize cases where adoptees couldn’t definitively prove falsification of biological details in their adoption papers, either through meeting their birth parents or verifying information about them.

On Wednesday, the panel resolved the standoff by unanimously agreeing to suspend, rather than completely drop, the investigation into the 42 cases. The approach leaves open the door for the cases to be reconsidered if a future truth commission is established. The panel also agreed to suspend investigations into the remaining 269 cases, citing insufficient time to complete the reviews before the deadline, according to three commission sources who described the discussions to the Associated Press.

No further investigations into adoptions for now

It was unclear if and when another commission will be established . Political attention is now focused on the early presidential election. South Korea’s constitutional Court formally removed Yoon from office on April 4, months after the opposition-controlled legislature impeached him over his brief imposition of martial law in December. The ruling triggered a snap presidential election set for June 3. Park Geon Tae, a senior investigator who led the probe into adoptions, said the truth commission would be unable to produce any further investigation reports on adoptions before the end of its mandate, after the terms of five of the nine commissioners ended following Wednesday’s meeting. This potentially paralyzes the decision-making process, which requires the support of at least five members. Most Korean adoptees were registered by agencies as abandoned orphans, even though many had relatives who could have been easily identified or located. This practice has often made it difficult—or even impossible—for them to trace their roots.

The reluctance of some commissioners to accept cases in which adoptees have been unable to find information about their birth parents reflects a lack of understanding of the systemic problems in adoption and contradicts the commission’s broader findings, which acknowledged the manipulation of children’s origins, said Philsik Shin, a scholar at South Korea’s Anyang University. Shin’s analysis of government, law enforcement, and adoption records concludes that more than 90% of Korean children sent to the West between 1980 and 1987, when adoptions peaked, almost certainly had known relatives.

The commission's findings released in March broadly aligned with previous reporting by The Associated Press. The AP 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.

Military governments implemented special laws aimed at promoting foreign adoptions, removing judicial oversight and granting vast powers to private agencies, which bypassed proper child relinquishment practices while shipping thousands of children to the West every year. 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.

South Korea’s government has never acknowledged direct responsibility for issues related to past adoptions and has so far not responded to the commission’s recommendation to issue an official apology.

Korean efforts to investigate past human rights violations

Modeled after the South African commission established in the 1990s to expose apartheid-era injustices, South Korea originally launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2006 to investigate past human rights violations. That ended its work in 2010.

Following the passing of a law that allowed for more investigations, the commission was relaunched in December 2020 under South Korea's former liberal government, with a focus on cases that occurred during the country's military dictatorships from the 1960s to 1980s.

Foreign adoptions were a major subject of the second commission, along with the atrocities at Brothers Home, a government-funded facility in Busan that kidnapped, abused and enslaved thousands of children and adults deemed as vagrants for decades until the 1980s.

In January, the commission confirmed at least 31 cases in which children from Brothers Home were adopted abroad, which came years after The AP exposed adoptions from the facility as part of a vast, profit-driven operation.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP