Obtaining documents on international adoptions from 1974 to 1981.
Circumstances of Korean government’s ‘connivance’ of illegal overseas adoptions.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs avoids responsibility for “private level issues”

The Truth and Reconciliation Committee is conducting a large-scale investigation to reveal allegations of illegal acts by adoption agencies and collusion and condonation by the Korean government during the international adoption of Korean children in the 1970s and 1990s. , a document was identified containing a conversation in the 1970s in which a foreign government protested the Korean government's practice of accepting money from adoption agencies in exchange for adoption and urged improvement.

At the time, the Korean government remained ignorant, calling it a 'private level problem', but this document is evaluated as showing that the Korean government's 'connivance' was behind the spread of illegal overseas adoption.

According to documents related to 'international adoption of orphans' written by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1974 to 1981, obtained by the Hankyoreh from the National Archives on the 12th, the Belgian government at the time raised several issues surrounding the overseas adoption of Korean children, including the involvement of illegal brokers, but the Korean government turned a blind eye. Several circumstances are confirmed. The Belgian government became desperate and even requested a meeting with President Park Chung-hee.

“I advised the Korean ambassadors, but no action was taken.”
On May 1, 1978, Vanhove, the Belgian consul in Korea, met with the Director of the European Affairs Bureau of the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and said, “A Lebanese-born woman named Born , who was working in connection with the Holt Children’s Welfare Association, was 1 “Korean orphans are being sold (to Belgium) for 800 to 1,200 dollars per person,” he said, adding that he would meet President Park Chung-hee and tell him this because the matter was urgent. Until the late 1970s, Belgium was the country with the largest number of Korean children adopted, following the United States, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.
 

The Belgian government appears to have taken this seriously because if money is exchanged in exchange for adoption, it can be considered child trafficking. Consul Vanhover told the Director of the European Bureau, “I met with the Director of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs last year and raised this issue, but I did not get any results. He strongly protested, saying, “I advised the Korean ambassadors in Belgium to ask the Korean government to step forward and stop (the broker’s intervention), but no action was taken.”

Suspicion of officials sharing adoption fees was also mentioned.
Adoption-related commissions were illegal under domestic law at the time. The Enforcement Decree of the Special Adoption Act, enacted in 1977, stipulates that 'an adoption agency may receive compensation for all or part of the costs incurred in adoption mediation from the prospective adoptive parents.' This means that only actual cost conservation is possible.

During the interview, Consul Vanhover also mentioned rumors in Belgium that high-ranking Korean government officials were sharing the adoption fee. There was pressure as to whether there was some kind of cartel between private companies and the government.

Director Koo Joo replied, “Please meet with the director of the Women’s and Children’s Bureau (Ministry of Health and Social Affairs), who is in charge, and talk about it.” However, on June 27, 1977, a year before this meeting, Consul Vanhover had already met with the Director of the Department for Women and Children of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs and complained with a similar point. As no further action was taken, the case went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs instead of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs a year later, and was sent back to the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs.

The director of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Women’s and Children’s Bureau met with Consul Vanhover the next day, saying, “The issue of orphan adoption is a private-level project. The Korean government is not involved. “If there are brokers taking commissions, that’s a Belgian problem,” she replied.
 

A transcript of a conversation regarding overseas adoption of Koreans delivered by the Belgian consul to the Director of the Women's and Children's Bureau at the office of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs of the Republic of Korea on May 2, 1978. At this meeting, the Director of Women and Children's Affairs responded as if she was avoiding responsibility, saying, “The issue of orphan adoption is a private-level business and a Belgian problem.” Data: National Archives of Korea
Afterwards, the problem was not resolved and international adoptions expanded further. According to a Blue House report document written by the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs in 1988 reported last year, “Four adoption agencies are receiving an adoption fee of $1,450 and airfare per child from adoptive parents, and in addition to the child support fee, they are also receiving an additional placement fee of $3,000 to $4,000.” ” contains the content.

Recognizing the problem, the government held a meeting of agency heads to improve the adoption business system. At this meeting, content such as 'A huge amount of real estate is being acquired with the proceeds from the adoption agency', 'We are wasting a lot of money on huge sales expenses', and 'We are receiving a lot of money from adoptive parents as a kickback fee', etc. comes out.

Noh Hye-ryeon, a professor of social welfare at Soongsil University who worked at Holt in the 1980s, said, “It appears that the Korean government used children for diplomacy against Nordic countries, which had a large demand for adoption.” Jung Fierens (47), who was adopted by Belgium in 1977, said, “It is shocking that the Korean government at the time turned a blind eye to the wrong adoption practices.” It is considerable. “If the Korean government had taken the necessary measures, adopted children like me would not have been separated from their biological parents and taken to a country on the other side of the world,” he said.

It is crucial to get the truth about South Korea's adoptions, says 50-year-old Lemmy Kook Lyngholm, after a Danish association has put pressure on South Korea to launch an investigation

3 Danes who were adopted from South Korea as children are now demanding that the South Korean government investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions.

At the head of the initiative is lawyer Peter Møller, who himself was adopted from South Korea. He has just been to South Korea to make the claim on behalf of the association Danish Korean Rights Group. A South Korean truth and reconciliation commission now has four months to decide whether to accept the request.

Lemmy Kook Lyngholm, you are deputy chairman of the Korea Club, whose members are adopted from Korea. What does it mean for you personally that Peter Møller has been to South Korea to demand an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the 53 adoptions?

It is very important to create openness about the South Korean adoptions. Worldwide, it is probably around 200,000 South Koreans who have been adopted over the past six decades. Today, many do not have access to the full truth about their adoption.

Hazaribag (Jharkhand), Mar 1 (PTI) A US-based couple has adopted an eight-month-old girl who was found abandoned in a dustbin in Jharkhand's Hazaribag town in June 2023, a senior district official said on Friday.
    On June 16 last year, some youths found the newborn crying and informed the district administration and Korra police station.
    Deputy Development Commissioner of Hazaribag, Prerena Dikshit, along with officer-in-charge of Korra police station Uttam Kumar Tiwari, recovered the child and transferred her to the newborn ward of Sheikh Bikhari Medical College and Hospital, Hazaribag.
    Dikshit, who also served as the administrator of Sheikh Bihari Medical College and Hospital, directed the hospital superintendent and other doctors to provide care for the baby.
    Upon full recovery, she was handed over to the Child Welfare Department of Hazaribag, said Dikshit.
    Once the child was fully recovered, the Child Welfare Department informed higher authorities, including the Central Adoption Resource Authority, which issued an adoption notice through its portal.
    Subsequently, the authorities of the Child Welfare Committee began searching for the biological parents of the abandoned child, but did not succeed. As per the rules, anyone can adopt the child after 60 days from the issuance of the notice.
    An American couple has now agreed to adopt the child, who is currently eight months old.
    Following the rehabilitation of the child by the American couple on Thursday, Dikshit expressed satisfaction and thanked the couple for adopting the kid. COR BS MNB

Recently, Delhi Police has arrested a gang in the case of human trafficking, eight persons including three women and two men from Punjab have been arrested in this gang. One of the arrested persons is a woman related to Mr. Muktsar Sahib. The girl who was being sold is also related to Mr. Muktsar Sahib's Giddarbaha, this girl has been rescued by the Delhi Police. Now the girl's parents have come forward who say that they had two girls earlier and when their third girl was born, a nurse told them that a family in Abohar needed a girl.

The girl was adopted from them on the assurance that the members of this family are in government service. Now they came to know about the entire incident, let us tell you that the alleged involvement of that nurse in this whole gang has also come to light. They had adopted this girl to Abohar's family through Aman Nars and even instead of taking omens at the time of adoption, they adopted the girl by giving omens in the hope that the girl would be brought up in a good family and their child would be happy. will remain

The European Court of Human Rights condemned Luxembourg in 2007 for banning full adoption for single women. However, fifteen years later, the legislation still has not changed.

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Old laws always contain some surprises, articles whose purpose has become obsolete or regressive. In Luxembourg, it was only in 1973 that women were legally allowed to open a bank account without their husbands, only in 1978 that they were able to terminate an unwanted pregnancy without being prosecuted, only in 2016 that unequal pay between women and men was punished by law. And then there are those articles of law that continue to exist in plain sight. Like the adoption law which, in its 1989 version, still reserved the possibility of adopting a child only to married couples.

This was without counting on the perseverance of Jeanne Wagner, a name that has long haunted the corridors of the Ministry of the Family. In 1995, Ms Wagner was 28 years old and began the process of adopting a child. "It may sound strange, but ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to adopt children", says the bubbly woman, now a grandmother. "It was always my dream". The young woman first turned to the Red Cross, "which refused me on the pretext that I was not married", then to the Luxembourg-Peru association. With the support of Luxembourg's honorary consul in Peru, Haydée Fischbach, she obtained the green light from Peru and packed her bags to pick up a three-year-old girl. "A few days before my departure, the Ministry of the Family contacted Mrs Fischbach to forbid her from sending me away and entrusting me with a child. They even told her that she could go to prison!"

"Mum didn't tell me everything so I wouldn't worry, but enough so that I knew she was fighting for me."

Alicia Johansen spent her childhood moving with her drug-addicted mom from one place to the next, trying to brace herself for the moment when the water and the electricity would get cut off. So at 22, when she had a chance to run Dolittle’s pool hall in the ranching town of Akron, Colorado, she was intent on making some money. She kept the bar open deep into the night, after the older guys who bet on horse races departed, and the truckers and the younger crowd, with the meth, drifted in. Meth, she soon discovered, helped her work longer hours.

An occasional customer was Fred Thornton, a former high school baseball star in his early 30s. Fred was sometimes a roofer and at other times unemployed and homeless. They began dating casually and using together, and he told her of his own complicated childhood: placed in foster care as a toddler, after allegations of neglect, and later adopted.

Alicia’s period was irregular because of the meth, which also dimmed her self-awareness. She was six months along before she realized that she was pregnant; a month after that, she woke up in pain. She had preeclampsia, which caused dangerously high blood pressure, and needed an immediate C-section. She was airlifted to a hospital in Denver, a hundred miles away. Her and Fred’s son, Carter James Thornton, was born on Aug. 6, 2019 — two and a half months premature, 2.5 pounds in weight, and, according to his lab work, exposed to meth and to THC.

That first week at the hospital, Alicia hovered over Carter, who was curled beneath a web of tubes and wires, before going home to get baby things. The third week, she and Fred visited their son and held him skin-to-skin. The fourth week, back in Akron, they faltered: They had no gas money for a return to the big city; they were bickering; they were high. On the fifth week, when Carter was stable enough to leave the neonatal intensive care unit, Alicia returned, but foster parents from Akron were the ones who took him home.

Carter’s drug exposure and his parents’ weekslong absence had triggered a call to child protective services and then a neglect case against Alicia and Fred in the juvenile court of Washington County, where they lived. To get their son back, the judge informed them, they’d need to take a series of steps laid out by the county’s human services department: pass random urinalysis drug tests, with missed ones considered positives; secure stable housing and employment; and make it to regular supervised visits with Carter. During the next three months, as the department steadily recorded Alicia and Fred’s positive drug tests and missed visits, none of their excuses were entertained, a hard line for which they would later be grateful. In December, they decided that if they wanted to raise their child together — and they did — they would have to get sober for good.

Discussed in this essay:

Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, by Rachel Nolan. Harvard University Press. 320 pages. $35.

In May 1982, Blanca Luz López entrusted her son, a toddler, to a full-time caretaker in a poor neighborhood of Guatemala City. This was a common arrangement for working mothers, like López, whose long hours prevented them from assuming themselves the responsibilities of parenting. She visited her son when she could, and then, one day that next February, he wasn’t there. The caretaker said she had sent the boy elsewhere “for his greater safety,” and gave López an address. López went to the house, and a woman there told her that the boy would be returned to her at a piñata party so that he could be given a proper goodbye.

When López and four other people—three adults and a child—arrived for the party, they were shown in, offered a bottle of liquor, and then set upon by a group of attackers with knives. All four adults, including López, were murdered, and the child was kidnapped. The assailants had already shuttled López’s son out of the country, and the other child was never seen again. To this day, neither has been found.

Before Guatemala outlawed foreign adoptions in 2007, one in a hundred children born there was adopted internationally. The country was second only to China in the number of children being sent abroad, yet Guatemala had a population of about thirteen and a half million people, roughly one one-hundredth of China’s. Rachel Nolan, in her detailed and heartrending first book, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, uses years of research to show the way that a country destabilized by war can invite merciless profiteers to break apart families such as López’s and allow others overseas to reconfigure them according to their own desires. For the three decades between 1977 and 2007, Guatemala allowed lawyers to match children with foreign families, with minimal oversight from a court. What happened in Guatemala, along with similar scandals in Romania, South Korea, and Peru, inspired the creation of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in 1993. The treaty now governs the way more than a hundred countries conduct adoption across national borders.

A Danish doctor-married couple discovered six years ago how official medical statements were being falsified when the humanitarian organization Terre des Hommes was mediating adopted children from Romania to Denmark.

The couple then reported the case to the Danish authorities. Nevertheless, it took several years before the Ministry of Justice, under current Minister of Justice Frank Jensen, intervened and stopped Terre des Hommes.

The case started for the married couple Peter Chr. Rasmussen and Agnes Winther, Århus, when they received a severely disabled girl in 1995. The child was two and a half years old and came from the notorious Romanian orphanage Babadag in the city of Tulcea.

Prayed especially for a healthy child
- We were getting old and had therefore stipulated that we did not want a disabled child, says Peter Chr. Rasmussen, who is now 56.

- At that time we had heard a little about the fact that many disabled children were coming up from Romania. That's why we specifically asked about it when we were at Als and spoke to Anne Botfeldt, the person responsible for Terre des Hommes' adoption department.

Anne Botfeldt promised the parents that they had nothing to be afraid of:

- No, there was no danger and no problems. On the contrary, we had been very lucky, because the orphanage Babadag was the best in all of Romania.

Before the adoption went through, medical reports were issued on the child. They determined that the little girl was healthy, of normal development and could both talk and walk.

So retarded girl in Kastrup
Peter Chr. Rasmussen and Agnes Winther were not down to pick up their daughter themselves. She was brought to Denmark by a young Danish man who was a volunteer for Terres des Hommes in Romania.

Already at Kastrup Airport, the couple could see that their child was ill.

- We are both doctors, and knew immediately that it was crazy. The girl was retarded and could do nothing. But of course we accepted her.

Immediately afterwards, the couple complained to the Directorate of Civil Rights under the Ministry of Justice.

- We told them what had happened and asked who actually controls the organizations that mediate the children.

Was threatened with Interpol
The couple's complaint did not cause the Directorate of Civil Justice to sound the alarm, but triggered a lengthy exchange of letters between the Directorate and Terre des Hommes.

But the complaint caused Terre des Homme's then chairman of the board, Jessie Rosenmeier, to write and scold the couple several times:

- We called her 'the lady in the hat'. She threatened to report us to nothing less than Interpol because we wouldn't report every six months and tell how the child was doing.

- Our answer was that when Terre des Hommes could falsify medical documents, they could also write such a report themselves, says Peter Chr. Rasmussen.

Traffic continued
Even though the authorities were now involved in the case, Terre des Hommes, Anne Botfeldt and Jessie Rosenmeier continued to send sick adopted children to Denmark. And the traffic continued with false medical certificates that officially made the children healthy.

The Civil Rights Directorate and the judicial authorities' reaction did not come until three years later.

Namely, a late summer day in 1998, when Peter Chr. Rasmussen and Agnes Winther talked about their experiences in a DR broadcast made by the now deceased TV documentarian Steen Baadsgaard.

A few days after the case was raised on television, the Ministry of Justice decided to conduct a retrospective study of around 200 Romanian adoption cases. Especially by Terre des Hommes and the organization's contact person in Romania.

But Terre des Hommes itself was allowed to continue its activities.

Right up until January 1999, when the organization was once again exposed as having sent a disabled child to an unsuspecting family.

Is eight years old and wears diapers
- The cases were hushed up, says Peter Chr. Rasmussen.

- What the motives have been remains uncertain. But there is a part that must have been sitting inside with some knowledge.

- Today we know that at least one in eight 'healthy' children who came to Denmark with Terre des Hommes had severe injuries and will be dependent on institutions for the rest of their lives.

- We ourselves love our own daughter, who is now eight years old, very much. She is loving, talks like a waterfall, and we have many happy moments together. But she is developed as a three-year-old, wears diapers and will never be able to fend for herself.

- And it has given us both a completely different life than we had imagined.

A Danish doctor-married couple discovered six years ago how official medical certificates were being falsified when the humanitarian organization Terre des Hommes conveyed adopted children from Romania to Denmark.

The couple then reported the case to the Danish authorities. Nevertheless, several years passed before the Ministry of Justice, under current Minister of Justice Frank Jensen, intervened and stopped Terre des Hommes.

The case started for the married couple Peter Chr. Rasmussen and Agnes Winther, Århus, when they received a severely disabled girl in 1995. The child was two and a half years old and came from the notorious Romanian orphanage Babadag in the city of Tulcea.

Prayed especially for a healthy child
- We were getting old and had therefore stipulated that we did not want a disabled child, says Peter Chr. Rasmussen, who is now 56.

- At that time we had heard a little about the fact that many disabled children were coming up from Romania. That's why we specifically asked about it when we were at Als and spoke to Anne Botfeldt, the person responsible for Terre des Hommes' adoption department.

Anne Botfeldt promised the parents that they had nothing to be afraid of:

- No, there was no danger and no problems. On the contrary, we had been very lucky, because the orphanage Babadag was the best in all of Romania.

Before the adoption went through, medical reports were issued on the child. They determined that the little girl was healthy, of normal development and could both talk and walk.

So retarded girl in Kastrup
Peter Chr. Rasmussen and Agnes Winther were not down to pick up their daughter themselves. She was brought to Denmark by a young Danish man who was a volunteer for Terres des Hommes in Romania.

Already at Kastrup Airport, the couple could see that their child was ill.

- We are both doctors, and knew immediately that it was crazy. The girl was retarded and could do nothing. But of course we accepted her.

Immediately afterwards, the couple complained to the Directorate of Civil Rights under the Ministry of Justice.

- We told them what had happened and asked who actually controls the organizations that mediate the children.

Was threatened with Interpol
The couple's complaint did not cause the Directorate of Civil Justice to sound the alarm, but triggered a lengthy exchange of letters between the Directorate and Terre des Hommes.

But the complaint caused Terre des Homme's then chairman of the board, Jessie Rosenmeier, to write and scold the couple several times:

- We called her 'the lady in the hat'. She threatened to report us to nothing less than Interpol because we wouldn't report every six months and tell how the child was doing.

- Our answer was that when Terre des Hommes could falsify medical documents, they could also write such a report themselves, says Peter Chr. Rasmussen.

Traffic continued
Even though the authorities were now involved in the case, Terre des Hommes, Anne Botfeldt and Jessie Rosenmeier continued to send sick adopted children to Denmark. And the traffic continued with false medical certificates that officially made the children healthy.

The Civil Rights Directorate and the judicial authorities' reaction did not come until three years later.

Namely, a late summer day in 1998, when Peter Chr. Rasmussen and Agnes Winther talked about their experiences in a DR broadcast made by the now deceased TV documentarian Steen Baadsgaard.

A few days after the case was raised on television, the Ministry of Justice decided to conduct a retrospective study of around 200 Romanian adoption cases. Especially by Terre des Hommes and the organization's contact person in Romania.

But Terre des Hommes itself was allowed to continue its activities.

Right up until January 1999, when the organization was once again exposed as having sent a disabled child to an unsuspecting family.

Is eight years old and wears diapers
- The cases were hushed up, says Peter Chr. Rasmussen.

- What the motives have been remains uncertain. But there is a part that must have been sitting inside with some knowledge.

- Today we know that at least one in eight 'healthy' children who came to Denmark with Terre des Hommes had severe injuries and will be dependent on institutions for the rest of their lives.

- We ourselves love our own daughter, who is now eight years old, very much. She is loving, talks like a waterfall, and we have many happy moments together. But she is developed as a three-year-old, wears diapers and will never be able to fend for herself.

- And it has given us both a completely different life than we had imagined.

FIRST PART 1956-1998
Section 1

On March 20 , 1968, the editor-in-chief of Germany's
  major national   newspaper 'Hamburger Abendblatt' wrote in his daily front page column "From a human perspective". The article can be seen th in facsimile, including in Danish translation 

 

        About helping others The purpose of life is to help people in need. At first it was Germany's mixed-race children whom she placed in Danish homes, and last year victims of the war in Vietnam.      Anna Lorenzen, Hamburg, manager of Terre des Hommes, had a lot to do last year. This was not least true in Hamburg's hospitals to provide beds for seriously injured war-disabled children and provide help for them. Anna Lorenzen, who was not a well-known name and did not have a bank account, but only lives on her pension, thanks to her vitality and incomparable energy, brought 20 Vietnamese children to our hospitals for treatment. The slim woman with the narrow face understands very well people who have had a difficult fate. Nor has her own fate been a bed of roses. Anna Lorenzen is Danish. She married a German who died in World War II. She herself was badly injured and lost her right arm. In 1945 she was taken prisoner and was only released again in 1956. Today, Hamburg is her home, and her purpose in life is to help those who have often been considered 'half people', as she herself expresses it. In that relationship, it doesn't matter to her whether it's a child from Vietnam, from India or from Germany. "But the Vietnamese children have the greatest need for help at the moment ," she believes. Right now, she visits the 15 most seriously injured children and young people in Bernbecker Hospital every day. They know her and are happy every time she comes. A happy child's laugh is the biggest thank you that Anna Lorenzen could wish for.