South Koreans abroad want probe into their past adoptions
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A group of South Korean adoptees in Europe rallied in Seoul with their local supporters on Tuesday, urging South Korean authorities to investigate their adoptions decades ago that they say were based on falsified documents and involved rights abuses.
About 200,000 South Koreans were adopted overseas in the past decades, mostly in the 1970-80s and mainly to white parents in the United States and Europe. Critics say past authoritarian leaders in South Korea 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.
“Our main goal is that all adoptees should have access to their own true information -- background information,” said Peter Møller, attorney and co-head of the Danish Korean Rights Group who was adopted to Denmark in 1974. “We are now fighting for the rights to know our own true story.”
Møller said his group has so far relayed more than 300 applications by South Korean adoptees abroad calling for investigations of their adoptions to South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His colleagues said that 24 of the applications were filed Tuesday and came from Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, the United States and other countries.
Some adoptees and their supporters demand the Truth and Reconciliation Commission establish that the government should also be held accountable for failing to monitor agencies and confirm whether the uptick in adoptions was fueled by increasingly larger payments and donations from adoptive parents, which apparently motivated agencies to create their own supply. The complaints by adoptees who filed the application include inaccurate or falsified information in adoption papers that distort their biological origins, such as...