South Korea, world’s largest ‘baby exporter’, accused of human rights violations to meet adoption demand

Truth and Reconciliation Commission finds decades of illegal overseas adoption enabled by government negligence

Truth and Reconciliation Commission chairperson Park Sun Young, right, comforts adoptee Yooree Kim during a press conference in Seoul on 26 March 2025 (AP)

A South Korean commission has accused successive governments of committing widespread human rights violations by enabling mass overseas adoption of at least 170,000 children, often through fraudulent and coercive means.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its findings on Wednesday after nearly three years of investigating complaints from 367 of the about 140,000 South Korean children sent to six European countries, including Denmark, which urged Seoul to probe the adoptions in 2022, as well as the US and Australia.

It found that local adoption agencies collaborated with foreign groups to mass export South Korean children, driven by monthly quotas set by overseas demand.

Many adoptions occurred through dubious or outright unethical means.

The commission determined “the state violated the human rights of adoptees protected under the constitution and international agreements by neglecting its duty to ensure basic human rights, including inadequate legislation, poor management and oversight, and failures in implementing proper administrative procedures while sending large numbers of children abroad”.

The report released on Wednesday covered the first 100 of the 367 complaints submitted by adoptees taken abroad between 1964 and 1999.

The adoptees, from 11 countries, had long suspected their adoptions were tainted by corruption and malpractice, concerns widely shared within the Korean adoptee community.

The commission concluded that 56 of the 100 adoptees were “victims” of state negligence, which constituted a violation of their rights under the South Korean constitution as well as international conventions.

It noted that South Korean agencies were given sweeping authority over children, including full guardianship and power to approve foreign adoptions. Such lack of oversight led to large-scale inter-country adoptions, with many children losing their true identities and family histories due to falsified or fabricated records.

South Korea has sent nearly 200,000 children abroad for adoption since 1953, making it the largest source of inter-country adoptees in the world. In the Asian country’s impoverished postwar years, the government prioritised overseas adoptions over developing a domestic welfare system, relying on private agencies to send children abroad in exchange for fees from adoptive families.

“Numerous legal and policy shortcomings emerged,” commission head Park Sun Young said. “These violations should never have occurred.”

Peter Moller, a South Korean adoptee from Denmark who led an international campaign for an investigation, told The New York Times that the truth commission’s report acknowledged “that the deceit, fraud, and issues within the Korean adoption process cannot remain hidden”.

The commission found that many children were sent abroad for adoption with “falsified or fabricated” identities and family histories, often without legal consent.

Adoption agencies, such as the Korea Social Service, misrepresented children’s backgrounds to their adoptive families and profited from the process.

They charged high fees and used the funds to acquire ever more children, the commission pointed out, making adoption “a profit-driven industry” in which children were treated like cargo.

South Korea’s government has never directly acknowledged responsibility for such adoption practices.

As of Thursday morning, Associated Press reported, the health and welfare ministry said it had not yet formally received the commission’s report but would “actively review” its recommendations.

It added that “efforts to improve the adoption system will continue”, citing its preparations to enforce a new law taking effect in July designed to strengthen the state’s responsibility over adoptions.

The commission said the government had “actively utilised” foreign adoptions, which “required no budget allocation”, instead of investing in a social safety net for vulnerable children.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Yooree Kim, sent to France by an adoption agency at the age of 11 without the consent of her biological parents, urged the commission to strengthen its recommendations.

She called on the government to promote broader DNA testing for biological families to improve the chances of reunions with their children and to officially declare an end to foreign adoptions.

She said that adoptees affected by illicit practices should receive “compensation from the Korean government and adoption agencies, without going through lawsuits”.

In keeping with its findings, the commission recommended the government issue a formal apology, provide remedies for the affected, and ratify The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.

“It’s been a long wait for everybody,” Han Boon Young, one of the 100 adoptees whose cases were heard by the commission, told CNN. “And so now we do get a victory. It is a victory.”

Ms Han, who grew up in Denmark, said that she was not officially recognised as a “victim” due to a lack of documentation.

“If they say, we recognise this is state violence, then how can they not recognise those who don’t have much information? Because that’s really at the core of our issues, that we don’t have information,” she told CNN. “It’s been falsified, it’s been altered.”