SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s reality fee has concluded that the federal government bears accountability for facilitating a international adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, pushed by efforts to scale back welfare prices and enabled by non-public businesses that usually manipulated youngsters’s backgrounds and origins.
The landmark report launched Wednesday adopted an almost three-year investigation into complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, america, and Australia, representing probably the most complete examination but of South Korea’s international adoptions, which peaked below a succession of army governments within the Seventies and ’80s.
The Fact and Reconciliation Fee, a government-appointed fact-finding panel, says it accomplished investigations into 56 complaints and goals to assessment the remaining instances earlier than its mandate expires in late Could.
The fee’s findings broadly aligned with earlier reporting by The Related Press. The AP investigations, which had been additionally documented by Frontline (PBS), detailed how South Korea’s authorities, Western nations and adoption businesses labored in tandem to produce some 200,000 Korean youngsters to oldsters abroad, regardless of years of proof that many had been being procured by way of questionable or outright unscrupulous means.
Western nations ignored these problems and typically pressured South Korea to maintain the children coming as they centered on satisfying their enormous home calls for for infants.
The fee really useful the South Korean authorities difficulty an official apology over the issues it recognized and develop plans to deal with the grievances of adoptees who found that the organic origins of their adoption papers had been falsified.
It additionally urged the federal government to research citizenship gaps among adoptees sent to the United States — the most important recipient of Korean youngsters by far — and to implement measures to help these with out citizenship, who might quantity within the 1000’s.
South Korea’s authorities has by no means acknowledged direct accountability for points surrounding previous adoptions, which have drawn rising worldwide consideration amid criticism that 1000’s of youngsters had been carelessly or unnecessarily separated from their organic households.
The Ministry of Well being and Welfare, the federal government division that handles adoption points, didn’t instantly touch upon the fee’s report.
Some adoptees criticized the report, saying it doesn’t set up the federal government’s complicity strongly sufficient and that its suggestions had been too weak.
