A Swedish legal expert investigating the country’s international adoption practices said Tuesday she’s trying to determine whether Swedish authorities were aware of falsified child origins as they approved the adoptions of thousands of South Korean children.
Anna Singer spoke to The Associated Press during a weeklong trip to South Korea, where she plans to meet with officials from government and a Seoul-based agency that handled adoptions to Sweden to gather details on how South Korea procured and documented children for foreign adoptions.
Many South Korean adoptees accuse their agencies of fabricating documents to expedite adoptions by foreigners, such as falsely registering them as abandoned orphans when they had relatives who could be easily identified, which also make their origins difficult to trace.
Most South Korean adoptees were sent overseas during the 1970s and ’80s, when Seoul was ruled by a succession of military governments that saw adoptions as a way to deepen ties with the democratic West while reducing the number of mouths to feed.
“Our primary focus is the Swedish organizations and the Swedish actors – what did they do and what did they know? But in order to get a full understanding, we also need to know how (adoptions were) organized in the countries of origin,” said Singer, a law professor at Uppsala University who was appointed by the Swedish government to lead the investigation in 2021.
She said such findings would be key in determining whether Sweden had effective safeguards or monitoring measures to ensure South Korean adoptees weren't wrongfully displaced from their biological parents.
Singer's investigation is aimed at identifying irregularities in the way Swedish government agencies, municipalities and adoption organizations handled international adoptions, which came from around 80 countries, including whether they were aware that child origins were being fabricated in sending nations.
A number of European countries have begun investigating how they’ve conducted international adoptions, in the face of growing concerns that children were being wrongfully removed from their biological families.
While the investigations have been triggered by more recent adoptions from South America and other parts of Asia, another focus has been the thousands of children adopted from South Korea during the country’s 1970-80s adoption boom, which created the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees.
Hundreds of Korean adoptees from Europe, the U.S. and Australia are demanding South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions, which they say were based on documents that falsified or obscured their origins.
The commission has accepted dozens among the nearly 400 applications filed last year and is expected to take more cases in the following months, opening what’s likely to be most meaningful inquiry into South Korea's foreign adoptions yet.
South Korea sent around 200,000 children to the West for adoptions in the past six decades, with more than half of them placed in the U.S. Along with France and Denmark, Sweden was a major European destination of South Korean children, adopting nearly 10,000 of them since the 1960s.
Singer said she has no immediate plans to direct investigate the cases of the 21 Swedish adoptees who submitted applications to the South Korean truth commission, but was actively communicating with Korean adoptee groups in Sweden while trying to establish details about systemic problems surrounding South Korean adoptions.
Singer’s team has so far interviewed more than 40 adoptees since starting the investigation in February 2022, including those from South Korea, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia, who she says have expressed similar complaints about a lack of access to records.
“They’re not there, they were burnt, they were drowned, they disappeared,” Singer said. “I mean, there’s thousands of different explanations on why they can’t access original files.”
