Seven months after a Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the program violated the human rights of adoptees, President Lee Jae-myung announced in a Facebook post on Thursday that he would offer “heartfelt apology and words of comfort” to South Koreans adopted abroad and their adoptive and birth families.
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The government was held accountable for facilitating adoptions through shady practices, including falsifying records and changing identities, according to the commission, which examined complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, the United States, and Australia.
When he considered the “anxiety, pain, and confusion” South Korean adoptees would have experienced when they were sent abroad as children, Lee called on officials to develop systems to safeguard the rights of adoptees and support their efforts to locate their birth parents.
More than 140, 000 children were sent abroad between 1955 and 1999 as a result of the mass international adoptions that were started after the Korean War to remove mixed-race children from societies that stressed ethnic homogeneity.
More than 100 children, typically unmarried women who face ostracism in a conservative society, are still being adopted abroad for adoption each year in the 2020s, a trend that has persisted in recent years.
The Hague Adoption Convention, a global agreement intended to safeguard international adoptions, was ratified by South Korea in July after years of delay. On Wednesday, the treaty became effective in South Korea.
Kim Dae-jung, the former president, expressed regret during a 1998 apology to adoptees from other countries, saying: “From the bottom of my heart, I am truly sorry. We have a serious offense against you, in my opinion.
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Source: Aljazeera
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