South Korea’s president has apologized for a notorious foreign adoption scheme set up after the 1950-53 Korean War that caused “anxiety, pain, and confusion” to more than 14,000 children sent abroad.
President Lee Jae-myung said in a Facebook post on Thursday that he was offering “heartfelt apology” to South Koreans adopted abroad and their adoptive and birth families, seven months after a Truth and Reconciliation Commission said the program violated the human rights of adoptees.
The commission, which investigated complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, the United States, and Australia, held the government accountable for facilitating adoptions through fraudulent practices, including falsifying records to portray children as abandoned orphans and switching identities.
Lee asked officials to formulate systems to safeguard the human rights of adoptees and support their efforts to find their birth parents.
Mass 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 society that emphasized ethnic homogeneity, with more than 140,000 children sent overseas between 1955 and 1999.
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