South Korea on Wednesday launched a committee to oversee domestic adoption policy, as well as individual adoption cases, in accordance with new legislation.
The 15-member adoption policy committee, chaired by Health and Welfare Minister Jeong Eun-kyeong, includes experts on adoption, medicine and law as well as academics.
It will review adoption policy plans, set standards for pre-adoption parental training and rule on the suitability of prospective parent-child pairings.
Two eight-member subcommittees will separately handle domestic and international adoption cases, with their rulings carrying the weight of the main committee.
At its first meeting, the panel discussed operating guidelines and the implementation of the new public adoption system, which transfers oversight of the process from private agencies to local governments and the state.
Jeong said the committee would be the “driving force” behind a transparent public adoption system focused on the best interests of children.
The Government is moving with urgency to suspend recognition of unsafe international adoptions to protect children and young people from harm, Associate Justice Minister, Nicole McKee says.
The Adoption Amendment Bill has been introduced to the House today to immediately and temporarily suspend New Zealand’s recognition of unsafe overseas adoptions for citizenship and immigration purposes.
“There is evidence that our international adoption laws do not provide sufficient safeguards for children and young people. Adoptions that take place in overseas courts do not always access or require an adoptive parent’s criminal or child protection record,” Mrs McKee says.
Child welfare has resurfaced as a rallying cry in Korea, particularly after a series of heartbreaking cases of abandonment and infanticide. This renewed attention reflects domestic concerns as well as a global shift in how adoption and child protection are understood. The 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption embodied this change, shifting focus from the interests of prospective parents toward the rights of children. Ratified by more than 100 countries and set to take effect in Korea this October, the convention reframes adoption as child-centered, emboldening many adoptees to organize and press for recognition of their lived experiences.
While adoptees have gained a stronger voice, unwed mothers — the primary source of children placed for adoption — remain marginalized. Society views unwed motherhood as an individual failing that signifies moral inferiority, even as intercountry adoption was shaped by broader structural forces.
It began in the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War, with tens of thousands of children orphaned and dependent on foreign relief. Stigmatized in a society that prized ethnic homogeneity, mixed-race children born to Korean women and foreign servicemen fueled intercountry adoption. Declining birthrates and concerns reflecting existing racial hierarchies in the United States further heightened demand for Korean children.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis undermined government efforts to curb intercountry adoption by producing new waves of poverty and family dissolution. In its aftermath, the government embraced a market-oriented welfare model characterized by deregulation. Above all, powerful, profit-driven adoption agencies — shielded by lax oversight — perpetuated the system. In this context, lacking both institutional support and societal acceptance, unwed mothers were often left with adoption as their sole recourse, a constrained choice that nevertheless exposed them to further stigma.
Switzerland is under scrutiny for fraudulently rehoming thousands of babies. The failures go back further than previously understoodThis story was initially published with our partner, New Lines magazine.
When Paul Harwood, a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency, relocated to Paris from Vietnam, he was keen to expand his family. It was 1961, the Berlin Wall was about to go up and Europe was embroiled in a Cold War crisis, keeping Harwood and his fellow agents on their toes. But besides his undercover work at the U.S. Embassy, Harwood was on a more personal mission: He and his wife, Mary Ellen, were trying to adopt a baby girl.
They ended up using an agency run by a Swiss welfare worker named Alice Honegger. Harwood welcomed her assistant to his apartment on the top floor of an older house in central Paris. A staircase led up to a room ready for a child, reachable via a gallery and complete with its own bathroom.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harwood are extremely likable people, kind, very calm, and I don’t see them as typical Americans at all,” reads the report she wrote for Honegger in St. Gallen, a canton in the country’s northeast near the blue-green waters of Lake Constance. “They are both of medium height, with brown eyes and brown hair.” The Harwoods wanted a girl to complement the little boy they had previously adopted in the United States.
On Aug. 2, 1962, the couple received a letter from Honegger’s agency with the news they had spent years agonizingly waiting for: a “very handsome” little girl of Italian nationality who was a perfect match for them, with the same color of hair and eyes. She added that the child’s expatriation papers were still missing but assured the new parents she would urge the birth mother and the Italian authorities to send what was necessary.
The baby arrived in France in November of that year and, by 1963, had been named Ann Elisabeth Harwood, according to her adoption papers. A few days after her arrival, Honegger wrote to the Harwoods asking them to stay in touch through the child’s development and to thank them for a future donation which would allow the agency to continue its work protecting “abandoned mothers and children.”
Throughout her nearly 50-year career, Honegger was keen to portray her work in an altruistic light, with the feelings of outcast women her main priority. But in actuality, she capitalized on the desperation of pregnant women with few options, coaxing, cajoling and sometimes simply stealing their babies to place them with affluent Americans. Among her clients were spies, diplomats and alleged criminals.
Switzerland’s past and present adoption system is under scrutiny following government-commissioned investigations that showed how thousands of children from at least 10 countries were fraudulently adopted between the 1970s and 1990s. The 2023 report shows that Swiss authorities were aware of the practices of child trafficking, falsification of documents and false indications of origin regarding children from Bangladesh, Brazil, India and elsewhere.
Our two-year investigation shows how Honegger cut her teeth exporting the children of migrant women and perfected her modus operandi for intercountry adoptions, setting the standards for this illicit and morally questionable industry. We reveal how her dubious practices date back much earlier than previously understood, to the late 1940s, leaving a legacy of distrust among the adoptees — including Harwood’s daughter, who, at 62, only recently discovered her true origin story.
By piecing together archival material in Switzerland, Canada and the U.S., interviews with adoption center workers, researchers and adoptees, and Honegger’s official correspondence obtained by archival requests, New Lines and Investigate Europe have found evidence that Honegger placed at least 2,000 babies with families until the 1970s and expanded her network to other parts of the world.
“Alice Honegger was very interested in having power over human beings,” journalist and researcher Sabine Bitter — who was commissioned by several Swiss cantons to investigate international adoptions and the activity of agents like Honegger — told New Lines. “She notoriously ignored the law and set her own rules.”
Honegger was first connected to illegal adoptions in 2017, some 20 years after she died. That year, the St. Gallen canton issued a report saying that up to 70% of the 750 adoptions of Sri Lankan children sent to Switzerland from the late 1970s to the 1990s were illegal. The report sent shockwaves across the Swiss adoption industry.
Today, adopted people from the 1950s and ‘60s are looking for answers. They want to know the truth about their adoption. They want to discover their birth parents and understand who is responsible for their lives.
A photograph of Ann Elisabeth Harwood, later Lisa Helmick, as a toddler.Courtesy of Lisa Helmick
In March 2022, while standing in line in a downtown store in Bassano del Grappa, my hometown in northeastern Italy, I met the Harwoods’ adopted daughter. She heard my Canadian partner’s accent and introduced herself as Lisa Helmick, a fellow North American but with an Italian mother from Bassano del Grappa. We got to talking and later had a drink together, when she told me how she was adopted by an American family and had recently found her birth family.
Her name is Ann Elisabeth, “but everyone calls me Lisa,” she said, explaining how her father was in the CIA. I had just become a mother myself and Helmick’s story seemed the opposite of mine: While I had come back to Bassano del Grappa from Sarajevo to deliver my baby, Helmick’s mother Aurora had departed Bassano del Grappa to give birth abroad to her only child.
Helmick had just moved to Bassano del Grappa with her husband to reconnect with her birth family, settling into a centrally located apartment with exposed wooden beams. “I’m trying to catch up with the time I’ve lost in the past 60 years,” she told me.
She always knew she was adopted but had been told by her parents that her mother was too poor to care for her. In 1999, when Helmick was training in Virginia to become a teacher, her father Paul died. “Everybody at his funeral thought he was working for the State Department,” Helmick’s husband Jeff tells me. Harwood didn’t reveal much about his job and past. Details of his daughter Lisa’s story were among his secrets.
But he left her some documents in a safe-deposit box in the bank. They detailed, in English and French, information about her adoption on onionskin paper with a large red wax stamp of the law firm that formalized the adoption in 1963. “When I opened up the envelope, it was amazing because a sentence stated my mother’s name, the town she was from and that I was named after her. So it was a shock. It was a surprise.”
For the first time, Helmick read the name of her birth mother, but she didn’t believe it was real. “I thought it was like Jane Doe protecting privacy. Well, because the names were the same,” she says. Confusing Helmick further was the fact that the mother and the daughter had the exact same name, Aurora Gramatica. The only detail that stayed in her mind was the Italian woman’s hometown, Bassano del Grappa. It was the initial element for searching for her birth family. But that’s not what happened.
“It was not the right moment,” Helmick explained. The 9/11 attacks happened shortly afterward and Jeff, as a colonel in the U.S. Army, had to go to the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. “I folded the documents up and I had three kids to raise.” Seventeen years passed before she began her search. “Had I done this a little earlier, I would have been able to talk to my mother,” she said, her words tinged with regret.
After years of abuses surrounding the adoption of children from abroad, the government introduced a subsidy program as a "compensation." These subsidies are for foundations that, among other things, assist adoptees in the search for their biological parents. A nice gesture, but in practice, it has proven to be ineffective.
A large proportion of the more than 40,000 adoptees in the Netherlands still struggle with questions: Who are my biological parents? Where do I come from? Was I given up voluntarily? Questions that often lead to uncertainty, anger, and much grief.
There's no guarantee of answers. But a subsidy is intended to support adoptees in their search for their identity and origins. The government has made €600,000 available annually, part of which is intended to support these searches.
Abuses
The subsidy program was established after serious abuses surrounding adoptions from abroad came to light in 2021. These included child theft, child trafficking, and document falsification. The Joustra Committee concluded that the government had been inactive for years.
The South Korean government has decided not to appeal any of the 71 cases concerning state liability for human rights abuse victims who were subjected to forced labor at two internment facilities, Brothers' Home in Busan and Seongam Academy in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, effectively acknowledging responsibility.
The long-awaited move is likely to expedite compensation for 647 victims of the two privately-owned facilities for "vagrants," which in reality operated as internment camps for people taken off the streets, including the homeless, children, people with disabilities and student protesters, under South Korea's authoritarian regimes of the 1980s.
According to the Ministry of Justice on Sunday, the government dropped all 52 appeals to either high courts or the Supreme Court and waived its rights to appeal the 19 court decisions, regarding the state's compensation payment to the victims.
Of all 71 cases, 49 cases revolved around state compensation to 417 victims of Brothers' Home, while 22 cases were related to 230 victims of Seongam Academy.
The decision "is a testament to the state's recognition of the human rights violations (that occurred) due to state violence in the authoritarian era," Justice Minister Jung Sung-ho said in a statement Sunday.
We have been horrified to learn about the scale of the allegations against SOS Children’s Villages in Syria, following reports in the media. Children are at the heart of everything we do, and learning about what these families have been through is truly heartbreaking. They deserve our full support and outrage.
We have been horrified to learn about the scale of the allegations against SOS Children’s Villages in Syria, following reports in the media. Children are at the heart of everything we do, and learning about what these families have been through is truly heartbreaking. They deserve our full support and outrage.
In the UK, we pride ourselves on having extremely high standards when it comes to supporting the work of our international programme partners.
During the civil war in Syria, it now appears that those high standards were not being met by the team at SOS Children’s Villages Syria, a national member of the SOS Children’s Villages Federation.
“From December 20, 2022, to September 1, 2025, a total of 21 children of the state have been adopted by prospective parents," Shimla Deputy Commissioner Anupam Kashyap said.
Two orphaned children, being taken care of under the “Children of the State” programme, were adopted by two couples from Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh at Shishu Grah (Infant Home) at Tutikandi in Shimla.
Shimla Deputy Commissioner Anupam Kashyap said, “From December 20, 2022, to September 1, 2025, a total of 21 children of the state have been adopted by prospective parents. The state government’s meaningful efforts are helping give a new life to these children.”
The DC appealed to prosperous members of society to come forward and adopt children growing up in infant homes and child welfare institutions to provide a happy and bright future to these children.
Shimla District Programme Officer Mamta Paul said, “Prospective adoptive parents, who apply, are selected for adoption based on merit. Only those who fulfil the rules and conditions as per the relevant act are eligible for adoption.”
Tobias Hubinette’s findings on illegal international adoptions confirmed by investigations in Seoul and Stockholm
Two decades ago, when Tobias Hubinette began publishing research papers on the dark history of Korea’s overseas adoption program, his work was dismissed as radical, even extremist.
Now, the Swedish adoptee — born in Korea as Lee Sam-dol — is seeing both Seoul and Stockholm acknowledge what he has long maintained.
Earlier this year, state-run commissions in both countries found widespread human rights violations in intercountry adoptions from the 1960s to 1990s, when the adoption of Korean babies to the West was at its peak.
It sounded like freedom, like a world of possibility beyond the orphanage walls.
Maria Pires was getting adopted. At 11 years old, she saw herself escaping the chaos and violence of the Sao Paulo orphanage, where she’d been sexually assaulted by a staff member. She saw herself leaving Brazil for America, trading abandonment for belonging.
A single man in his 40s, Floyd Sykes III, came to Sao Paulo to meet her. He signed some paperwork and brought Maria home.
She arrived in the suburbs of Baltimore in the summer of 1989, a little girl with a tousle of dark hair, a nervous smile and barely a dozen words of English. The sprawling subdivision looked idyllic, with rows of modest brick townhouses and a yard where she could play soccer.
