The Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed human rights violations in just 56 of the 367 complaints filed by adoptees before suspending its investigation on Wednesday night, just one month before its May 26 deadline.
The fate of the remaining 311 cases, either deferred or incompletely reviewed, now hinges on whether lawmakers will establish a new truth commission during South Korea’s next government, which takes office after the presidential by-election on June 3.
After a nearly three-year investigation into adoption cases across Europe, the United States and Australia, the commission concluded in a March interim report that the government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption program riddled with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to cut welfare costs and carried out by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins.
However, some adoptees, and even members of the commission, criticised the cautiously-worded report, arguing that it should have more forcefully established the government’s complicity.
Disputes also arose after the commission’s nine-strong decision-making panel, dominated by conservative-leaning members appointed by recently ousted president Yoon Suk Yeol and his party, voted on March 25 to defer the assessments of 42 adoptee cases, citing insufficient documentation to conclusively prove the adoptions were problematic.
On Wednesday, the panel resolved the standoff by unanimously agreeing to suspend, rather than completely drop, the investigation into the 42 cases.
Seoul has never acknowledged direct responsibility for issues related to past adoptions and has so far not responded to the commission’s recommendation to issue an official apology.
South Korea originally launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2006 to investigate past human rights violations. That ended its work in 2010.
Following the passing of a law that allowed for more investigations, the commission was relaunched in December 2020, with a focus on cases that occurred from the 1960s to 1980s.
Foreign adoptions were a major subject of the second commission, along with the atrocities at Brothers Home, a government-funded facility in Busan that kidnapped, abused and enslaved thousands of children and adults deemed as vagrants for decades until the 1980s.
In January, the commission confirmed at least 31 cases in which children from Brothers Home were adopted abroad. (AP)
