The Swiss government will help people adopted from Sri Lanka up until the 1990s search for their birth families under a pilot project launched on Monday, after a scandal over allegations that child traffickers had sent stolen children to Europe.
The issue came to light after a Dutch television documentary in 2017 reported that thousands of Sri Lankan children were given up for adoption, often illegally, in European countries over the course of several decades.
The Swiss government in 2020 acknowledged with regret that authorities had turned a blind eye to adoptions from Sri Lanka up until the late 1990s despite clear indications of serious irregularities in some cases.
