The South Korean government’s fact-finding commission has suspended its ground-breaking investigation into the widespread fraud and abuse that harmed the country’s historic foreign adoption program.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed human rights abuses in only 56 of the 367 accusations lodged by adoptees before stopping its inquiry on Wednesday night, one month before the May 26 deadline.
The fate of the remaining 311 cases, which have been deferred or incompletely evaluated, now depends on whether lawmakers will create a new truth commission through legislation during Seoul’s next government, which takes office following the presidential by-election on June 3.
After a nearly three-year investigation into adoption cases in Europe, the United States, and Australia, the commission concluded in a March interim report that the government is responsible for facilitating a foreign adoption program riddled with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to cut welfare costs and carried out by private agencies that frequently manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins.
However, some adoptees, and even members of the commission, criticised the cautiously-worded report, arguing that it should have more forcefully established the government’s complicity. Disputes also arose after the commission’s nine-member decision-making panel, dominated by conservative-leaning members appointed by recently ousted President Yoon Suk Yeol and his party, voted on March 25 to defer the assessments of 42 adoptee cases, citing insufficient documentation to conclusively prove the adoptions were problematic.
Commission officials haven’t disclosed which documents were central to the discussions.
On Wednesday, the panel resolved the standoff by unanimously agreeing to suspend, rather than completely drop, the investigation into the 42 cases.
The approach leaves open the door for the cases to be reconsidered if a future truth commission is established. The panel also agreed to suspend investigations into the remaining 269 cases, citing insufficient time to complete the reviews before the deadline, according to three commission sources who described the discussions to the Associated Press.
It was unclear if and when another commission will be established .
Political attention is now focused on the early presidential election.
Military governments implemented special laws aimed at promoting foreign adoptions, removing judicial oversight and granting vast powers to private agencies, which bypassed proper child relinquishment practices while shipping thousands of children to the West every year.
Western nations ignored these problems and sometimes pressured South Korea to keep the kids coming as they focused on satisfying their huge domestic demands for babies.
South Korea’s government has never acknowledged direct responsibility for issues related to past adoptions and has so far not responded to the commission’s recommendation to issue an official apology.
South Korea formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2006 to investigate past human rights crimes, drawing inspiration from the South African commission established in the 1990s to expose apartheid-era atrocities.
Following the passage of legislation allowing for more investigations, the commission was reactivated in December 2020 by South Korea’s former liberal government, with a focus on incidents that occurred under the country’s military dictatorships from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Foreign adoptions were a major subject of the second commission, along with the atrocities at Brothers Home, a government-funded facility in Busan that kidnapped, abused and enslaved thousands of children and adults deemed as vagrants for decades until the 1980s.
