Recent adoption-related lawsuits in Korea

Since the 1950s, South Korea has sent over 200,000 children to be adopted in foreign countries. Starting in the late 1990s, some of these adoptees began to return to their birth country. While adoption has often been portrayed as happy stories in Korean media, some of these returnees provided a more complicated picture by sharing their hardships and the struggles they endured - stories that Koreans in South Korea may struggle to grasp.

Although adoptees’ fight for recognition and rights in Korea began shortly after an early wave of adoptees returned to Korea, adoptee activism gained momentum in the early 2000s. Many of the returnees, mostly in their 20s and 30s, initiated an adoptee movement in South Korea. This culminated in the 2010s when the efforts of adoptees, Koreans, including single Korean mothers, led to an amendment of the Special Adoption Law in 2012 and a series of UN rights bodies and foreign states issuing several adoption-related recommendations to Korea. However, this movement gradually waned as these adoptees grew older, some leaving the country or moving on to focus on other areas of their lives. 

Initially, adoptees faced challenges with the Korean legal system due to limited resources and few Korean lawyers being familiar with adoptee issues. However, this situation changed as the US began to deport Korean adoptees who hadn’t obtained U.S. citizenship. Before the US Child Citizenship Act of 2000, inter-country adoptions to the US did not automatically grant citizenship.  

In January 2019, Adam Crapser (Korean name: Shin Song-hyuk), a deported American adoptee, filed the first lawsuit by an international adoptee in South Korea, seeking damages from the Korean government and his adoption agency. Later that year, in November, U.S. adoptee Kara Bos (Korean name: Kang Mi-Sook) filed a paternity suit against her biological father, whom she had discovered while searching into her origins. She eventually won her case after court-ordered genetic testing confirmed their relationship.

In 2022, 375 overseas adoptees applied for an investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), an independent organization tasked with examining abuses committed by previous South Korean government administrations. Due to the high volume of adoptees’ cases, the TRC’s investigations are still ongoing. 

In July 2024, a Danish adoptee filed an administrative lawsuit against the National Center for the Rights of the Child, a public institution under the Korean government's Ministry of Health and Welfare, challenging the denial of information. Crapser filed a civil lawsuit, another adoptee filed a family lawsuit, and this Danish adoptee’s lawsuit is the first administrative lawsuit. It also marks the second overseas adoptee’s lawsuit against the Korean government. 

On October 7, 2024, Ms. Tae Soon Han, the birth mother of a U.S. adoptee, filed a lawsuit against the Korean government, an adoption agency, and an infant care center. It represents the first-of-its-kind case in Korea. Not only is it a lawsuit by a birth mother, but it is also the first by a birth parent to hold the state accountable for a missing child adopted abroad without parental consent. Han's daughter, who went missing at the age of 6 in May 1975, wasn’t found until October 2019, 44 years after her disappearance. She had been adopted to the U.S. nine months after she went missing. This case highlights how South Korea's focus on expanding intercountry adoption and expediting the process at the expense of reuniting missing children led to such tragedies. 

Nearly two decades after international adoptees began speaking out in South Korea, their voices, efforts, and time have built growing momentum to uncover the truth about the past. While the media and public in receiving countries are abuzz, particularly after a recent PBS documentary on Korean international adoption garnered significant attention in the U.S., the Korean media have been notably silent on this issue, instead choosing to focus on K-Pop and Han Kang's Nobel Prize.

Despite the challenges foreign nationals face pursuing lawsuits in Korea, overseas adoptees persist. As more adoptees and birth parents take legal action against the country that promoted overseas adoption, the truth about the 200,000 adoptees continues to surface, and additional lawsuits and legal proceedings are anticipated.