The Danish Appeals Board said its findings support “systematic misconduct” in adoptions from South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.
advertisementA new Danish report has claimed that adoptions from South Korea to Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s were “characterized by systematic illegality” in the Asian country.
The report states that these violations “allowed children to change information about their backgrounds and adopt children without their biological parents’ knowledge.”
The report, released Thursday, was the latest in a dark chapter on international adoption. In 2013, the Seoul government began requiring foreign adoptions to go through a family court. The move ended a decades-long policy of allowing private agencies to make child abandonment, custody transfer and immigration decisions.
The Danish Appeals Board, which oversees international adoptions, said there was an “unfortunate incentive structure in which large sums of money were transferred between Danish and Korean organizations” surrounding adoptions.
The 129-page report, published by an agency under the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs, focuses on the period from 1970 to 1989.
Over the past 20 years, a total of 7,220 adoptions have been made from South Korea to Denmark.
The report is based on the results of 60 investigations from three private Danish agencies dealing with adoptions from South Korea: Dan Adopt, AC Berne Hjerp and Terre des Hommes. His first two agencies merged to become Danish International Adoptions, and his third agency closed his adoptions in 1999.
The agency wrote that two agencies, Dan Adopt and AC Berne Hjerp, were “aware of this practice” of changing information about a child’s background.
The report was prepared in response to a number of issues raised by Danish Korean rights groups. In 2022, rights group representative Peter Mueller also submitted a document to Seoul’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“Danish organizations continued to express a desire to maintain a high number of adoptions of children of certain ages and health conditions from South Korea,” the report said. The Korean agencies that sent the children to Denmark were the Holt Child Welfare Corporation and the Korea Social Welfare Corporation.
Han Bunyoung, from the Danish activist group, told The Associated Press that an independent investigation is still needed because such investigations “hope that those responsible will ultimately be held accountable for their actions.” He said that.
From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Korean institutions actively recruited newborns and infants from hospitals and orphanages, often in exchange for money, and maternity facilities where single mothers were pressured to give up their babies. operated.
Adoption workers traveled to industrial and low-income neighborhoods, looking for struggling families to persuade them to give up their children.
In early January, Denmark’s only overseas adoption agency, DIA, said it was “scaling back” its facilitation of international adoptions after the agency expressed concerns about fabricated documents and procedures that obscure the biological origins of children abroad. ‘Then he announced. In recent years, DIA has brokered adoptions in the Philippines, India, South Africa, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic.
Adopters in Europe, the United States and Australia have long warned of fraud involving infants falsely registered as abandoned orphans despite having living relatives in their home countries.