Decades after being sent overseas as children, thousands of Korean adoptees are done waiting for sympathy. They want answers, records, and someone held responsible. South Korea international adoptees who spoke to reporters this month say an official apology from the government feels hollow without real accountability behind it.

A Presidential Apology, Long Overdue

Earlier this year, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung issued a public apology to overseas adoptees and their families. He said he felt “heavy-hearted” thinking about what so many had endured after being sent abroad as children.

The apology followed a nearly three-year investigation by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Investigators reviewed 367 cases and found a pattern of fabricated records, tampered identities, and children falsely registered as orphans despite having living parents.

For many Korean adoptees looking for birth parents, the findings confirmed what they had suspected for years. Their paperwork had been altered, sometimes deliberately, to make them easier to place overseas.

How the System Broke Down

South Korea sent more than 140,000 children abroad after the 1950-53 Korean War, when intercountry adoption was treated as a practical solution for orphaned and mixed-race children. By the 1970s and 1980s, it had become a well-funded industry.

Local adoption agencies were given broad authority, including guardianship rights and the power to consent to adoptions on a child’s behalf. That authority, combined with almost no independent oversight, opened the door to abuse. Agencies were found to have colluded with foreign partners to meet placement quotas set by demand overseas, not by the actual number of children who needed homes.

In some cases, if a child died or was reclaimed by a birth family before an adoption went through, agencies simply substituted another child’s identity to keep the placement on track. That single detail explains why so many adult adoptees, searching for the truth decades later, keep hitting dead ends.

Adoptees Speak: “It’s Complicated”

Anders Riel Muller was three years old in 1980 when relatives placed him in an orphanage without his parents’ knowledge. The agency handling his case knew his parents were alive but listed him as an orphan anyway, assigning him a false name and birth date.

Now a professor in Norway, Muller still returns to South Korea regularly. “My relationship with South Korea is very complicated,” he told Al Jazeera, describing a country he loves visiting but one that, in his words, never really wanted him.

Other adoptees describe a similar tangle of emotions. Anne-Kim-Loesch, who attended a recent gathering of overseas adoptees in Seoul, said the hardest part isn’t the distance from Korea  it’s not knowing whether her own file was manipulated too, and never being able to fully explain that feeling to friends back home who weren’t adopted.

Who Ran the Agencies

Four agencies handled the vast majority of South Korea’s international adoptions: Holt, the Eastern Social Welfare Society, the Korea Welfare Society, and Korea Social Service. All were based in Seoul, and each built relationships with partner agencies overseas to place children in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

Holt is the best known name in this story. Holt Children’s Services in Korea split from its American counterpart, Holt International, back in 1977, though the two continued working together for years afterward. Adoptees have accused Holt Korea, along with the South Korean government, of negligence and, in some cases, outright fraud in how cases were handled during the adoption boom.

The pressure on these agencies has been building for a while. Adoption files that used to sit with individual Korean adoption agencies are now being transferred to a government body, the National Center for the Rights of the Child. Holt Korea’s intake for new applications has also been closed for some time, and the country’s Ministry of Health and Welfare has announced plans to phase out private adoption agencies entirely, aiming for a fully state-run system by 2029.

What the Rules Look Like Today

South Korea’s adoption requirements have tightened considerably since the unregulated decades of the past. Homestudies now have to go through Hague-accredited agencies, and there are firmer rules around applicant age, health, and background checks before a placement can move forward.

The government has also expanded support for single mothers in Korea, funding programs that help them keep and raise their children rather than relinquish them for adoption. That shift matters, because it directly targets one of the root causes of the old system: birth mothers who felt they had no real choice but to give up a child.

Modern intercountry adoption practice has also changed in smaller, practical ways. Waiting children today are typically listed through structured photolisting programs, giving prospective parents verified information about a child’s background and needs, rather than the vague, often falsified paperwork adoptees are now discovering in their own files.

Why This Story Reaches Beyond Korea

South Korea’s reckoning isn’t happening in isolation. Similar investigations have opened in Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where officials have raised concerns about their own countries’ roles in accepting children with questionable paperwork.

At the United Nations, investigators have criticized South Korea for failing to give adoptees effective access to remedies for past abuses, including what some described as possible enforced disappearances. That kind of language, more commonly used in cases involving state violence, shows how seriously international human rights bodies are now treating the adoption cases.

South Korea’s Justice Ministry has said it wants to expand legal remedies for adoptees affected by state-led abuses. But adoptee advocates and their lawyers argue that promises without firm legislation behind them don’t mean much. A bill that would have removed the statute of limitations on state-related human rights violations was vetoed last year, before President Lee took office, leaving many cases in legal limbo.

What Happens Next

The truth commission’s original investigation covered only 367 of an estimated tens of thousands of cases that could involve similar problems. Whether the remaining cases get a proper review depends on lawmakers passing new legislation to relaunch and expand the commission’s mandate.

For now, adoptees are left doing much of the legwork themselves: requesting files from the NCRC, comparing notes with other adoptees, and pushing agencies and officials for records that, in many cases, may never have been accurate to begin with. Advocacy groups continue pressing both the South Korean and receiving-country governments to expand resources and strengthen protections for the adoptees and birth families still searching for each other.

The apology was a start. Whether it turns into anything more concrete is still an open question, and it’s one that thousands of Korean adoptees around the world are watching closely.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can South Korean adoptees get citizenship?

It depends on the country and the individual adoptee’s paperwork history. Many Korean adoptees, particularly those placed in the United States before the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, never had their citizenship formally processed by their adoptive parents, leaving them without legal status in the country they grew up in. Some have discovered this only as adults, sometimes after facing deportation proceedings. Since South Korea does not generally recognize automatic dual citizenship for adoptees, regaining or confirming Korean citizenship usually requires a separate application process, and outcomes vary depending on each adoptee’s documented history and current residency status.

Why are so many Koreans adopted?

The practice traces back to the aftermath of the Korean War, when large numbers of orphaned and mixed-race children needed care and international adoption was presented as a practical, humanitarian response. What began as a wartime measure grew into a long-running, profitable system through the 1970s and 1980s, driven by demand from adoptive families overseas and supported by adoption agencies that operated with minimal government oversight. Investigations have since shown that some children labeled as orphans actually had living parents, meaning the scale of adoptions was driven as much by agency practices and foreign demand as by genuine need.

What is the 3-3-3 rule in Korea?

The 3-3-3 rule refers to a South Korean law requiring a mandatory waiting period before a birth mother’s relinquishment of a child for adoption becomes final. Under the rule, birth parents must wait a set number of days after childbirth before they can legally register a child for adoption, giving them time to reconsider the decision without pressure. The rule was introduced as part of broader adoption reforms aimed at protecting birth parents from being rushed into decisions they might later regret, addressing one of the criticisms raised repeatedly in cases reviewed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.