This week has been huge for the Korean intercountry adoptee community. On the 26th of March 2025, the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) presented their initial findings at the press release. You can read the official TRC press release here, the detailed findings here and other official material is here.
You can also read co-founder’s Boonyoung’s speech and Danish Korean Right Group (DKRG)’s press release here.
Why should anyone involved in intercountry adoption care about this? Simply because South Korea is the world’s largest exporter of children via intercountry adoption. Out of the 1.2m intercountry adoptees sent around the world, as documented by Peter Selman (2021), South Korea is the largest sender of children. South Korea’s program was also considered to be the Blue Ribbon standard of intercountry adoption practices and processes, replicated around the world by many adoption agencies beginning with Holt International, and then replicated into other birth countries.
So if one considers the truth of what has now been revealed in South Korea by its own truth investigation, one can correctly assume that these same illicit and illegal practices have resulted in gross human rights abuses and are replicated in almost every intercountry adoption conducted around the world. This is backed up by the growing list of investigations conducted by European adoptive countries, starting with the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Switzerland, Norway, and the only non-European country, Quebec who has suspended all intercountry adoptions but without revealing a public report.
At ICAV, we have shared for years that we question the truth of our adoption paperwork, our identities, the back stories of our so called “relinquishment”, and how our biological families have been treated in their time of vulnerability. The South Korean TRC initial findings validate what our ICAV Perspective papers presented in 2020 to the Hague and to the United Nations in 2023 – that this is the way in which MOST intercountry adoptions have been done around the world, regardless of our birth or adoptive countries.
Intercountry adoption involves the cooperation of TWO countries. So whilst South Korea as a birth country has now acknowledged the wrongs involved on their end, we are yet to see many of the other adoptive countries, especially non European countries acknowledge their complicity in this mass human rights abuse practice. Without their demand that took advantage of a struggling country, without their closed eyes to what is now in plain sight, without the funds sent from adoptive parents and countries to birth countries and organisations, none of this would have been possible. Adoptive parents and adoptive countries must now also account for what they have demanded, created, and participated in.
Now is the time also for adoptive governments and adoption agencies to acknowledge, make amends and right the wrongs to the almost 1.2m of us who have been forcibly displaced, our identities erased, our families removed from us via what often appears as legal means but of illicit and illegal practices that obliterate our human rights.
Let me remind you again of the top priorities the global community shared in our first collaborative effort that I compiled for the Hague in 2020 on what we victims want as responses from both governments for our illicit, illegal and human rights abusive intercountry adoptions:
- Create a legal framework, including a definition of what constitutes an illegal intercountry adoption so that victims can be recognised and perpetrators can be punished
- Swift responses and harsh penalties to perpetrators including compensation for victims
- Funded supports for impacted victims including DNA and geneology services to trace families
- Universal access to support vulnerable mothers and families to help keep them together and prevent further trade of children across borders
- Eliminate money from intercountry adoption processes and practices
Forcibly displacing vulnerable children, especially as children of colour, across geographical boundaries is NOT in our best interests and results in many human rights abuses under the current practices enshrined in the 1993 Hague Convention – adoptions done outside of these boundaries (expatriate and private adoptions) are even worse. Love and wealth is not enough for a child to replace all they lose in intercountry adoption and its practices that ignore our human rights. The ICAV website is a testimony that material wealth and love can never replace what we lose in genetic connections, ethnic, cultural and spiritual ties.
It is time to reckon with the truth and turn it into meaningful action by both adoptive and birth countries.
Resources
What do I want from my adoptive parents?
Korea’s Adoption Fraud (Documentary by Frontline and 8 part series by AP)
International Adoption – A global scandal (documentary by ARTE with english subtitles) ( contact ICAV if you have trouble viewing either of these documentaries)