Adoptees in Australia are calling for an inquiry and formal apology following allegations South Korea committed mass human rights abuses in its inter-country adoption program.

Pippa McPherson says when she gave birth to her son she started to search for answers about her birth family. Source: Supplied

Pippa McPherson came to Australia as a four-month-old in 1986, to live with her adopted family in Melbourne.

 

She's still never spoken to her birth family in South Korea and believes the adoption paperwork she has is false, so she's never been sure of where she really came from, or if she has siblings.

 

Korea and Norway agreed Thursday to cooperate on investigations into intercountry adoption irregularities and support the rights of affected adoptees, as both nations conduct separate probes into past adoption practices.

Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Chairperson Park Sun-young met with Camilla Bernt, head of the Norwegian Investigation Committee on Intercountry Adoption, in Seoul, where the two sides agreed to share their respective investigative findings.

Their meeting took place a day after the TRC announced the initial findings of its yearslong probe into adoption misconduct from the 1960s to 1990s, which unearthed the Korean government's mistakes and oversights in the process.

The investigation found that inadequate government supervision and administrative failures led to widespread misconduct, falsified documents and corrupt practices.

"Korea is the country from which there has been the highest number of adoptions to Norway, totaling more than 6,500 children. For the Norwegian committee, TRC’s investigation is therefore highly relevant. The report will be an important source for our investigation and evaluation," Bernt told The Korea Times in an email.

The Minister of Social Affairs will have detailed how an expanded investigation will be financed.

After previously refusing to expand an investigation into the area of ​​adoption, Minister of Social Affairs Sophie Hæstorp Andersen (S) will now enter into dialogue with the opposition.

She does this after the opposition gathered a domestic political majority on Thursday for an expanded investigation , which is not only a historical investigation, but also a legal assessment.

- Now I have heard the desire from the opposition parties to expand the investigation, and I look forward to getting more details on exactly what they agree on and how they envision it being financed, says Sophie Hæstorp Andersen.

Question: So you won't rule out expanding it?

ISS (International Social Service) is a worldwide organization that works for the protection and well-being of children. In the context of its work, the organization is well placed to give an impression of the positive and negative feelings, but also the challenges that adoptees can face when searching for their roots. They made a brochure about this in English, French, Spanish and Dutch .

A process that varies from person to person

The search for roots is a process that takes place at different times in life and for different reasons. What this process looks like varies from person to person. For one adoptee, questions about roots never arise, while for another, solving these questions is of vital importance. The answers can look very different: from gaining access to the file, to traveling to the country of origin, to meeting the birth family.

Challenges along the way

Searching for roots presents challenges such as gaining access to information and files. Language barriers, cultural and financial differences also play a role in an intercountry adoption. A search can have a very positive result. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and the search itself does not always go smoothly.

This fundraising challenge to individuals, governments, and philanthropies will provide essential nutrition programmes and urgently needed supplies for the most vulnerable children and women

PARIS/NEW YORK, 27 March 2025 – Today, global nutrition leaders met in Paris at the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit to discuss how to improve access to life-saving child and maternal nutrition.

To significantly address the urgent needs of the most at-risk women and children, UNICEF, in collaboration with the Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the UK government and other private and public partners, established the CNF in 2023 with a goal of raising US$2 billion by 2030.

Currently, the World Bank estimates that an additional US$13 billion per year over the next 10 years (2025-2034) is needed to scale up nutrition interventions to address undernutrition globally.

The CNF is an ambitious UNICEF-led financing mechanism designed to accelerate the scale-up of evidence-based, high-impact actions to tackle critical nutrition challenges, including wasting, stunting and anemia in children and women in high-need countries. By addressing both prevention and treatment, the CNF bridges critical gaps in nutrition services, ultimately saving lives and building resilience in vulnerable communities. The CNF aims to reach 320 million children and women annually with life-changing nutrition programmes.

South Korea's adoption practices over nearly 50 years are being butchered in a new report, with the government largely blamed.

The report, prepared by South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and presented at a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday, follows a three-year investigation and describes the entire adoption process as a mistake.

The commission also believes that the government must apologize to the victims and provide compensation to children whose identities were forged.

Many children were given orphan status even though their parents were alive, which has made it very difficult for adopted children to track down their biological relatives. Some of the children were outright abducted from their parents before they were adopted.

The commission states that for almost 50 years, South Korea handed over responsibility to adoption agencies without adequate oversight, and that the adoptions were characterized by fraud and mismanagement.

Entrepreneur and media personality Anitha Clemence has spent most of her adult life wondering about her adoption.
When she was 26, she went to India with her then-boyfriend.
There, she began to unravel her past, even though it was difficult.

Anitha Clemence was actually worried about what she would find out about her biological family.

– I was really scared. I had a boyfriend in high school who was adopted from Chile. When he went back, he found out that his mother had been a prostitute and drug addict, so I was scared of what I might encounter, says Anitha when we meet at the Soho House members' club in Stockholm.

Anitha knew that she had been found on the street outside a hospital in the city of Kottayam, just a few days old. It was the summer of 1978 and nuns had cared for her inside the hospital.

In this strictly Catholic region of India, it is very common for children born out of wedlock to be left outside the hospital, as the mother otherwise risks social death and exclusion.

Switzerland is considering banning international adoptions following the exposure of questionable past practices. Other countries have halted international adoptions in the name of child welfare.

No more foreign children should be adopted in Switzerland: this is the plan presented by the Federal Council last January. The Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP) has been tasked with preparing a bill by the end of 2026. This radical decision was taken after the publication of a damning report in 2023. 

Berne then acknowledged significant irregularities in international adoptions that took place between 1970 and 1999. The findings of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences highlighted systemic failures and negligence on the part of federal and cantonal authorities. Also read:End of international adoptions in Switzerland

Several thousand children from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, India, Colombia, South Korea, Lebanon and Romania were brought to Switzerland through illegal practices, including child trafficking, falsified documents and the lack of information about their origins.

Written consent from biological parents was often lacking.  

Adoptees demand concrete support following first-ever government acknowledgment of adoption misconduct

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Wednesday found that past Korean governments were responsible for human rights violations in overseas adoptions from the 1960s to the 1990s, pointing to falsified records and inadequate supervision.

This marks the first official acknowledgment by the Korean government of the irregularities in the nation’s previous overseas adoption system — issues that hundreds of adoptees have been raising in recent years.

Following a yearslong probe, the TRC concluded that legislative gaps, inadequate government oversight and administrative failures led to widespread misconduct.

A South Korean official enquiry said on Wednesday the government was responsible for abuse in international adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent, and recommended an official state apology.

"It was determined that the state neglected its duty ... resulting in the violation of the human rights of adoptees protected by the constitution and international agreements during the process of sending a lot of children abroad," South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission said.

The country remains one of the biggest ever exporters of babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999.

International adoptions began after the Korean War as a way to remove mixed-race children, born to local mothers and American GI fathers, from a country that emphasised ethnic homogeneity.

It became big business in the 1970s to 1980s, bringing international adoption agencies millions of dollars as the country overcame post-war poverty and faced rapid and aggressive economic development.

More recently, the main driver has been babies born to unmarried women, who still face ostracism in a patriarchal society, and according to academics, are often forced to give up their children.

In a landmark announcement, the country's truth commission concluded after a two-year and seven-month investigation that human rights violations occurred in international adoptions of South Korean children, including "fraudulent orphan registrations, identity tampering, and inadequate vetting of adoptive parents."

It also said "numerous cases were identified where proper legal consent procedures" for South Korean birth parents were "not followed."

The commission also said Seoul failed to regulate adoption fees, allowing agencies to set them through "internal agreements," effectively turning it into a profit-driven industry.

And despite regulations requiring verification of adoptive parents' eligibility, an overwhelming majority, 99 percent, of intercountry adoption approvals in 1984 alone were granted on the same day or the following day, the commission said, citing its investigation.

"These violations should never have occurred," the commission's chairperson Park Sun-young said.

"This is a shameful part of our history," she added.

For years, Korean adoptees have advocated for their rights, many reporting that their birth mothers were forced to give up their children, leading to the fabrication of records to make them legally adoptable.

Some South Korean birth parents and adoptees even claimed that their children were kidnapped – by agents who sought out unattended children in poor neighbourhoods – or that authorities directed lost children towards adoption without trying to reunite them with their families, in some cases intentionally changing the child's identity.

Some adoptees – such as Adam Crapser – were deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their US citizenship.

The commission confirmed human rights violations in only 56 out of 367 complaints, saying there was an overwhelming amount of data to try to verify, and said it would "make efforts" to review the remaining cases before its investigation expires on May 26.

Some adoptees were dissatisfied with this outcome, urging the commission to fully recognise violations in all 367 cases.

"Without the truth, our lives rests upon guesses, estimations and creative narratives," Boonyoung Han, a Danish Korean adoptee, said.

"We are victims to state violence but without a trace! Literally. Destruction and withholding of our documents must not leave us open to eternal uncertainty."

Hanna Johansson, a Korean adoptee in Sweden, said she considers the commission's announcement a "victory" for her adoptee community regardless.

"I also hope that more and more South Korean [birth] parents who lost their child without their consent will come forward and demand justice," she said. (AFP)