South Korea ratifies treaty aimed at safeguarding international adoptions

SEOUL, South Korea — After years of delay, South Korea has ratified the Hague Adoption Convention, an international treaty meant to safeguard international adoptions, highlighting a significant policy shift decades after sending tens of thousands of children to the West through an aggressive but poorly regulated adoption system.

The government's announcement Tuesday came as it faces growing pressure to address widespread fraud and abuse that plagued its adoption program, particularly during a heyday in the 1970s and '80s when the country allowed thousands of children to be adopted every year.

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

South Korea's Foreign Ministry and Health and Welfare Ministry, which handles adoption policies, issued a joint statement saying the country submitted the necessary documents to ratify the Hague Adoption Convention to the Dutch Foreign Ministry, the treaty's depositary.

The treaty, which requires countries to strengthen state oversight and safeguards to ensure international adoptions are legal and ethical, will take effect in South Korea on Oct. 1.

South Korea signed the Hague convention in 2013, but ratification was delayed by more than a decade as the country struggled to bring adoptions under centralized government authority, as required by the treaty, after allowing private agencies to control international child placements for decades.

''Going forward, intercountry adoptions will be permitted only when no suitable family can be found in his or her state of origin, and only if deemed to serve the child's best interests through deliberation by the adoption policy committee under the Ministry of Health and Welfare,'' the ministries said.

The statement said the ratification was a significant step toward safeguarding children's rights and ''establishing an advanced, internationally compliant intercountry adoption system in Korea, reinforcing the government's commitment to upholding state responsibility across the entire adoption process.''

A 2023 law also mandates the transfer of all adoption records from private agencies to the National Center for the Rights of the Child by July, aiming to centralize processing family search requests from adoptees who have returned to South Korea as adults seeking their roots.

International adoptions from South Korea have plummeted in recent years, with only 58 in 2024, according to government data.

During the 1980s, South Korea sent an average of more than 6,000 children abroad each year, under a previous military government that viewed adoption as a way to reduce mouths to feed and curry favor with Western nations.

Authorities specifically targeted children deemed socially undesirable, including those born to unwed mothers or impoverished families, and granted extensive powers to private adoption agencies to dictate child relinquishments and custody transfers, allowing them to send huge numbers of children abroad quickly.

Much of South Korea's recent reforms have focused on abuse prevention, including a 2011 law reinstating judicial oversight of foreign adoptions that led to a significant drop in international placements. But officials are at a loss over how to handle the huge numbers of inaccurate or falsified records accumulated over past decades, which have prevented many adoptees from reconnecting with their birth families or obtaining accurate information about their biological origins.

In a landmark report in March, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and enabled by private agencies that often manipulated children's backgrounds and origins.

The commission's findings broadly aligned with a 2024 Associated Press investigation, in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), which detailed how South Korea's government, 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 being procured through questionable or outright unscrupulous means.

South Korea's government has never acknowledged direct responsibility for issues related to past adoptions and has so far ignored the commission's recommendation to issue an apology.

Some adoptees criticized the truth commission's cautiously worded report, arguing it should have more forcefully acknowledged the government's complicity and offered more concrete recommendations for reparations for illegal adoption victims.

The commission's investigation deadline expired in May, after it confirmed human rights violations in just 56 of the 367 complaints filed by adoptees since 2022. The fate of the remaining 311 cases, either deferred or incompletely reviewed, hinges on whether lawmakers will establish a new truth commission through legislation.