South Korea relaunches truth commission
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.
Human rights abuses
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 1950-1953 Korean War, repression during the military dictatorships of the 1960s to 1980s, and decadeslong 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.
Significant report
The suspension of the prior adoption probe in 2025 followed a nearly three-year review of cases across Europe, the US 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.
