South Korean truth commission halts probe into adoption fraud, hundreds
of cases in limbo
[April 24, 2025]
By KIM TONG-HYUNG
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The South Korean government’s fact-finding
commission suspended its groundbreaking investigation into the extensive
fraud and abuse that tainted the nation’s historic foreign adoption
program, a decision stemming from internal disputes among commissioners
regarding which cases warranted recognition as problematic.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed human rights
violations in just 56 of the 367 complaints filed by adoptees before
suspending its investigation Wednesday night, just one month before its
May 26 deadline.
The fate of the remaining 311 cases, either deferred or incompletely
reviewed, now hinges on whether lawmakers will establish a new truth
commission through legislation during Seoul’s next government, which
takes office after the presidential by-election on June 3.
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.
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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.
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