COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — A Danish report on Thursday stated that adoptions of kids from South Korea to Denmark within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties was “characterised by systematic unlawful conduct” within the Asian nation.
These violations, the report stated, made it “doable to vary details about a toddler’s background and undertake a toddler with out the data of the organic mother and father.”
The report was the most recent in a darkish chapter of worldwide adoptions. In 2013, the federal government in Seoul began requiring international adoptions to undergo household courts. The transfer ended the decadeslong coverage of permitting personal companies to dictate youngster relinquishments, switch of custodies and emigration.
The Danish Appeals Board, which supervises worldwide adoptions, stated there was “an unlucky incentive construction the place giant sums of cash have been transferred between the Danish and South Korean organizations” over the adoptions.
The 129-page report, printed by an company beneath Denmark’s ministry of social affairs, centered on the interval from Jan. 1, 1970 to Dec. 31, 1989.
A complete of seven,220 adoptions have been carried out from South Korea to Denmark throughout the twenty years.
The report based mostly it findings on 60 circumstances from the three privately run companies in Denmark — DanAdopt, AC Boernehjaelp and Terres des Hommes — that dealt with adoptions from South Korea. The primary two merged to turn into Danish Worldwide Adoption whereas the third company closed its adoptions in 1999.
The company wrote that two of the companies — DanAdopt and AC Boernehjaelp — “have been conscious of this follow” of adjusting details about the kid’s background.
The report was made after a lot of points raised by the group Danish Korean Rights Group. In 2022, Peter Møller, the pinnacle of the rights group, additionally submitted paperwork on the Reality and Reconciliation Fee in Seoul.
“Danish organizations constantly expressed a need to keep up a excessive variety of adoptions of kids with a particular age and well being profile from South Korea,” the report stated. The South Korean companies that despatched youngsters to Denmark have been Holt Kids’s Companies and the Korea Social Service.
Boonyoung Han of the Danish activist group, instructed The Related Press that an impartial investigation was nonetheless wanted as a result of with such a probe “we anticipate that these accountable will lastly be held accountable for his or her actions.”
Within the late Nineteen Seventies and mid-Eighties, South Korean companies aggressively solicited newborns or younger youngsters from hospitals and orphanages, usually in trade for funds, and operated maternity properties the place single moms have been pressured to present away their infants. Adoption employees toured manufacturing unit areas and low-income neighborhoods looking for struggling households who could possibly be persuaded to present away their youngsters.
On Jan. 16, Denmark’s solely abroad adoption company DIA stated that it was “winding down” its facilitation of worldwide adoptions after a authorities company raised issues over fabricated paperwork and procedures that obscured youngsters’s organic origins overseas. In recent times, DIA had mediated adoptions within the Philippines, India, South Africa, Thailand, Taiwan and the Czech Republic.
For years, adoptees in Europe, america and Australia have raised alarms about fraud, together with infants who have been falsely registered as deserted orphans after they had dwelling kinfolk of their native nations.
___ Tong-hyung Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.