Nearly 300 South Koreans who were adopted to European and American parents as children have so far filed applications demanding South Korea’s government to 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.
Peter Møller, attorney 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.
Møller’s group last month initially 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 from the world, prompting the group to expand its campaign to Holt and KSS adoptees outside of 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.
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 re-taken by the 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.
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 make 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 lead 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 custodies and emigration for decades.
