SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea has relaunched a fact-finding commission into its past human rights violations, with a key focus on the extensive fraud and malfeasance that corrupted the nation’s historic foreign adoption program.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the third in the country’s history, began accepting new cases Thursday, months after the previous one's mandate ended in November with more than 2,100 complaints unresolved.
The new commission will inherit those cases, including 311 submissions by Korean adoptees from the West that were either deferred or incompletely reviewed before the second commission halted a landmark investigation into adoptions in April last year, following internal disputes over which cases warranted recognition as problematic.
Advocates say interest among adoptees is far higher this time, with hundreds already seeking investigations, including many from the United States, who were underrepresented in the previous inquiry even though American parents were by far the biggest recipients of Korean children over the past seven decades.
But investigators who served on the previous commission said it could take months — possibly until May or June — for the new probes to actually get underway. The government has yet to appoint a chair to lead the commission, which has not formed investigative teams and will initially be run by civil servants assigned to receive and register cases.
The new commission, established under a law passed in January expanding its investigative mandate, will also investigate other human rights abuses potentially attributable to the government, including civilian killings around the 1950-53 Korean War, repression during the military dictatorships of the 1960s to 1980s, and decades-long abuses of inmates at welfare facilities.
South Korea sent thousands of children annually to the West from the 1970s to the early 2000s, peaking at an average of more than 6,000 a year in the 1980s. The country was then ruled by a military government that saw population growth as a major threat to its economic goals and treated adoptions as a way to reduce the number of mouths to feed, contributing to what’s now possibly the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees.
The suspension of the prior adoption probe in 2025 followed a nearly three-year review of cases across Europe, the U.S. and Australia, during which the second commission confirmed human rights violations in just 56 of 367 complaints filed by adoptees.
Still, the commission issued a significant interim report concluding that the government bears responsibility for a foreign adoption program riddled with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and carried out by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins.
The report, which challenged a longstanding narrative shared in South Korea and receiving nations in the West that adoptions were driven mainly by humanitarian concerns, broadly aligned with previous reporting by The Associated Press.
The AP investigations, in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), drew from thousands of documents and dozens of interviews to show how South Korea’s government, Western nations and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence that many were being procured through corrupt or outright illegal means.
