Dozens of South Koreans adopted by Danish parents decades ago have formally demanded the South Korean government investigate their adoptions, which they say were marred by widespread practices that falsified or obscured children’s origins

SEOUL, South Korea -- Dozens of South Koreans adopted by Danish parents decades ago have formally demanded the South Korean government investigate their adoptions, which they say were marred by widespread practices that falsified or obscured children’s origins.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul has up to four months to decide whether to accept the application collectively filed Tuesday by the 53 adoptees. If it does, that could possibly trigger the most far-reaching inquiry into foreign adoptions in the country, which has never fully reconciled the child export frenzy engineered by past military governments that ruled from the 1960s to ’80s.

The application cites a broad range of grievances emphasizing how scores of children were carelessly or unnecessarily removed from their families amid loose government monitoring and a lack of due diligence.

Perhaps more crucially, the country’s special laws aimed at promoting adoptions practically allowed profit-driven agencies to manipulate records and bypass proper child relinquishment.

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.

"More than 1,000 children from Mariupol were illegally given to foreigners in Tyumen, Irkutsk, Kemerovo and in the Altai district" in Siberia, says the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

Ukraine accused Moscow on Tuesday, August 23 of organizing massive illegal adoptions of Ukrainian children transferred from occupied areas to Russia. "Russia continues to kidnap children from Ukrainian territory and arrange for their illegal adoption by Russian citizens," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"More than 1,000 children from Mariupol" , a port city in south-eastern Ukraine that fell into the hands of the Russian army, "were illegally given to foreigners in Tyumen, Irkutsk, Kemerovo and in the district of 'Altai' , in Siberia, the ministry said, citing information released by authorities in Krasnodar, a city in southwestern Russia not far from Ukraine.

More than 300 Ukrainian children are also kept in "special establishments" in the Krasnodar region, he said.

"Deportations"

Marshall couple finds good solution for their desire in becoming parents

MARSHALL — Jason and Amber Swenson wanted a family after they first got married, so they turned to the adoption system.

More than a decade later they’re the proud parents of two adoptive sons, Leo and Brayden. They adopted Leo in 2013 and Brayden in 2019.

They said they turned to adoption after efforts to have children on their own did not result in pregnancy. They chose it rather than going through fertility specialists.

“It just came up in a conversation one day,” Amber said. “We’d both had thoughts about adoption and were very interested in it. Things went forward based on that.”

Nanna Nørby Hansen

53 people, via the group Danish Korean Rights Group, have today demanded from the South Korean government an investigation into the circumstances of adoptions from South Korea to Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s.

They do so on the basis of testimony that adoption information has been incorrect.

According to AP News , the group believes that some of the adoptions were corrupt and that the children were wrongly registered as orphans.

- The Korean state at that time stamped many papers saying that people were found on the street. If you do a little math, it would mean that from the 1970s and 1980s Seoul would be flooded with baskets of children lying around on the street, says Peter Møller, who is a lawyer and co-leader of Danish Korean Rights Group.

Savita was 12 when she was raped. A DNA test from her son, born out of her rape, helped the police track down the accused.

On the morning of August 11, Savita, 42, was getting ready to leave for work when she received a phone call from her lawyer.

He told her the Uttar Pradesh police had arrested two men for repeatedly raping Savita nearly 30 years ago. Savita had been 12 at the time.

“I felt relief, exhaustion, sadness, joy, anger – all at once,” Savita told Newslaundry. “I want to see both of them once and give them one slap. They ruined my life.”

As a result of the rapes, Savita had delivered a child when she was 13 years old. It was a DNA test that matched the child to one of the accused which led the police to finally make the arrests. The two men – Mohammad Razi, 48, and Naqi Hasan, 51 – are brothers.

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From: ACT

Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2022 at 10:57

Subject: UNCRC Acquis

To:

Tens of thousands of children have suffered the collapse of both their birth and adoptive families. Their pain has largely existed in the shadows, shielded from broad public view and the dominant narrative of a happily ever after.

Though most adoptions remain intact, a USA TODAY investigation found more than 66,000 adoptees ended up in the foster care system between 2008 and 2020. That is an undercount. Many states are bad at tracking adoption failure. And some adoptions break outside the child welfare system’s view, when youth informally move in with other people, are privately readopted, return to their birth countries or live on the streets.

After these adoptees’ adoptive families fractured, they used their experience as fuel to improve the system for others. Here are their stories:

Explore the series: ‘A broken system’ leaves tens of thousands of adoptees without families, homes

Matthew Peiffer

As a baby, Daniëlle Schipper (38) was adopted from Colombia. Despite her happy childhood and warm bond with her adoptive parents, she began to suffer from depression around the age of 19. In 2009 - Daniëlle had just become a mother - a floodgate of unprocessed grief opened and she developed a severe depression. "I weighed only 49 kilos and had suicidal thoughts."

'Looking back, I've struggled with my adoption since I was a teenager,' says Daniëlle. “But at the time, I didn't reach the right door for help. When I was again bothered by this all-consuming miserable feeling at the age of 23, I went to my doctor. He prescribed antidepressants and after a few weeks of feeling even worse, it started working happily. The sharpness of the miserable feeling disappeared, but I also felt different, flatter than before. I took that into the bargain because anything was better than a depression.'

'I became a mother and a floodgate of unprocessed grief opened'

'I had no identity'

Daniëlle's life goes on for a number of years until things really go wrong in 2009. 'I became a mother and together with this wonderful event, a floodgate of unresolved grief opened. I struggled with the true story of my adoption, which I had not been told until I was 14. My adoptive parents then told me that I had no identity in Colombia and therefore had received the passport of a deceased child: Beatriz. She was supposed to be adopted by my parents but died before that time.

(CNN)Jimmy Amisial was walking through Gonaives, Haiti, on his way to a New Year's Eve party to ring in 2018 when he spotted a large crowd and approached it.

"When I got to the place where the people were making noise I saw a baby," said Amisial, 22 at the time and visiting his homeland on a break from school in Texas. "It was in a pile of trash crying, and there wasn't a single soul who wanted to do anything about it."

While the locals were afraid to touch the infant because they feared the child was either cursed or evil, Amisial said, he nervously picked him up.

"He had no clothes on. He had fire ants crawling all over him because he's been there for a couple of hours. When I picked him up he immediately stopped crying."

A bond was made and now, more than four years later, Amisial is trying to make fatherhood official by formally adopting the boy he has not let go of since that night.