South Korea's president apologizes over poorly managed foreign adoption programs

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s president apologized Thursday for poorly managed foreign adoption programs that were rife with abuses and fraud, months after the country’s truth commission admitted state responsibilities for such practices for the first time.

President Lee Jae Myung said in a Facebook post that he was offering “heartfelt apology and words of comfort” on behalf of the country to South Koreans adopted abroad and their adoptive and birth families.

Findings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and recent court rulings have confirmed some cases of human rights abuses in the course of international adoptions, Lee said, adding that the government failed to play its role in such cases. He did not elaborate.

Lee said he “feels heavy-hearted” when he thinks about “anxiety, pain and confusion” that South Korean adoptees would have suffered when they were sent abroad as children. He asked officials to formulate systems to safeguard the human rights of adoptees and support their efforts to find their birth parents.

South Korea has faced growing pressure to address widespread fraud and abuse that plagued its adoption programs, particularly during a heyday in the 1970s and 1980s when the country allowed thousands of children to be adopted each year.

Many adoptees discovered their records were falsified to portray them as abandoned orphans, while others were carelessly removed, or even stolen, from their birth families.

In a landmark report in March, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded the government bore responsibility for facilitating adoption programs that were driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs. The report followed a nearly three-year investigation into complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, the United States and Australia.

Its finding broadly aligned with a 2024 Associated Press investigation, in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), which detailed how South Korea’s governments, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply around 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence that many were procured through questionable or outright unscrupulous means.

After years of delay, South Korea in July ratified the Hague Adoption Convention, an international treaty meant to safeguard international adoptions. The treaty took effect in South Korea on Wednesday.