South Korea relaunches truth commission on adoption fraud

South Korea has reopened its Truth and Reconciliation Commission and put foreign adoption fraud back near the top of its agenda, after the previous commission’s mandate expired in November with more than 2,100 complaints unresolved.

According to The Independent, the new body began accepting cases on Thursday and will inherit 311 submissions by Korean adoptees in Western countries that were deferred or left incomplete after the second commission suspended a landmark adoption investigation in April last year amid internal disputes over which cases merited recognition. Investigators involved in the previous commission said it may take months — potentially until May or June — before new probes are fully underway because the government has not yet appointed a chair and investigative teams have not been formed.

The numbers underline the scale of the system under review. South Korea sent thousands of children abroad each year from the 1970s to the early 2000s, peaking at an average of more than 6,000 annually in the 1980s, the report says. The country’s military government treated population growth as an economic threat and used overseas adoption as a pressure valve — a way to reduce welfare burdens and the number of dependants inside the state’s own budget lines.

That framing matters because it changes what “humanitarian adoption” looks like when administered at industrial volume. The commission’s interim report from its earlier work concluded that the government bears responsibility for a program “riddled with fraud and abuse,” driven by cost reduction and carried out through private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins. When the state licenses a small number of intermediaries and rewards throughput — placements completed, paperwork cleared, foreign relationships maintained — the temptation is to minimise friction: missing consent forms become “foundlings,” uncertain parentage becomes a clean file, and a child becomes exportable.

Receiving countries were not passive observers. The Independent notes that investigations by The Associated Press and PBS Frontline have described how South Korea’s government, Western governments and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply around 200,000 Korean children to families overseas despite long-running evidence that some children were procured through corrupt or illegal means. That scale creates its own constituency: agencies, lawyers, social workers and officials whose careers depend on the pipeline continuing — and whose incentives rarely align with later efforts to reconstruct identity and responsibility.

Truth commissions can document patterns and issue institutional judgments, but they rarely function like courts. The previous commission confirmed human-rights violations in 56 of 367 complaints filed by adoptees after nearly three years of review, a ratio that reflects both a high evidentiary bar and the practical limits of reconstructing decades-old paper trails.

For now, the new commission’s first task is administrative: receiving cases while waiting for leadership appointments. It is reopening into a backlog of thousands, in a system that once processed thousands of children a year.

The commission is accepting new complaints, but it still does not have a chair.