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Sweden faces call to halt international adoptions after inquiry finds abuses and fraud

Published: 02 Jun. 2025, 19:47

Civic organization members hold a protest in central Seoul on April 10 demanding the government disclose information related the people who were adopted to families in foreign countries. [YONHAP]

A Swedish commission recommended on Monday that international adoptions be stopped after an investigation found a series of abuses and fraud dating back decades.

Sweden is the latest country to examine its international adoption policies in the wake of allegations of unethical practices, particularly in Korea.

The commission was formed in 2021 following a report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter detailing the Scandinavian country’s problematic international adoption system. Monday’s recommendations were sent to Minister of Social Services Camilla Waltersson Gronvall.

“The assignment was to investigate whether there had been irregularities that the Swedish actors knew about, could have done and actually did,” Anna Singer, a legal expert and the head of the commission, said in a press conference. “And actors include everyone who has had anything to do with international adoption activities.

"It includes the government, the supervisory authority, organizations, municipalities and courts. The conclusion is that there have been irregularities in the international adoptions to Sweden.”

The commission called on the government to formally apologize to adoptees and their families. Investigators found confirmed cases of child trafficking in every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s, including from Sri Lanka, Colombia, Poland and China.

Singer said a public apology, besides being important for those who are personally affected, can help raise awareness about the violations because there is a tendency to downplay the existence and significance of the abuses.

Peter Moller, left, and Han Boon-young, co-founders of the Danish Korea Rights Group, and adoptee Kim Yoo-ree, right, attend a press conference at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul on March 26. [AP/YONHAP]

An Associated Press investigation, also documented by PBS's Frontline, last year reported dubious child-gathering practices and fraudulent paperwork involving Korea’s foreign adoption program, which peaked in the 1970s and 1980s amid huge Western demand for babies.

The AP and Frontline spoke with more than 80 adoptees in the United States, Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to reveal evidence of kidnapped or missing children ending up abroad, fabricated child origins, babies switched with one another and parents told their newborns were gravely sick or dead, only to discover decades later they’d been sent to new parents overseas.

The findings are challenging the international adoption industry, which was built on the model created in Korea.

The Netherlands last year announced it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from abroad. Denmark’s only international adoption agency said it was shutting down and Switzerland apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoptions. France released a scathing assessment of its own culpability.

Korea sent around 200,000 children to the West for adoptions over the past six decades, with more than half of them placed in the United States. Along with France and Denmark, Sweden was a major European destination of Korean children, adopting nearly 10,000 of them since the 1960s.

AP