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STOCKHOLM -- A Swedish committee recommended Monday that international adoptions beryllium stopped aft an probe recovered a bid of abuses and fraud dating backmost decades.
Sweden is the latest country to analyse its planetary adoption policies aft allegations of unethical practices, particularly successful South Korea,
The committee was formed successful 2021 pursuing a study by Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter detailing the Scandinavian country’s problematic planetary adoption system. Monday’s recommendations were sent to Minister of Social Services Camilla Waltersson Grönvall.
“The duty was to analyse whether determination had been irregularities that the Swedish actors knew about, could person done and really did,” Anna Singer, a ineligible expert and the caput of the commission, told a property conference. “And actors see everyone who has had thing to bash with planetary adoption activities.
"It includes the government, the supervisory authority, organization, municipalities and courts. The decision is that determination person been irregularities successful the planetary adoptions to Sweden.”
The committee called connected the authorities to formally apologize to adoptees and their families. Investigators recovered confirmed cases of kid trafficking successful each decennary from the 1970s to the 2000s, including from Sri Lanka, Colombia, Poland and China.
Singer said a nationalist apology, too being important for those who are personally affected, tin assistance rise consciousness astir the violations due to the fact that determination is simply a inclination to download the beingness and value of the abuses.
An Associated Press investigation, besides documented by Frontline (PBS), past twelvemonth reported dubious child-gathering practices and fraudulent paperwork involving South Korea’s overseas adoption program, which peaked successful the 1970s and `80s amid immense Western demands for babies.
The AP and Frontline spoke with much than 80 adoptees successful the U.S., Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to uncover grounds of kidnapped oregon missing children ending up abroad, fabricated kid origins, babies switched with 1 different and parents told their newborns were gravely sick oregon dead, lone to observe decades aboriginal they’d been sent to caller parents overseas.
The findings are challenging the planetary adoption industry, which was built connected the exemplary created successful South Korea.
The Netherlands past twelvemonth announced it would nary longer let its citizens to follow from abroad. Denmark’s lone planetary adoption bureau said it was shutting down and Switzerland apologized for failing to forestall amerciable adoptions. France released a scathing appraisal of its ain culpability.
South Korea sent astir 200,000 children to the West for adoptions successful the past six decades, with much than fractional of them placed successful the U.S. Along with France and Denmark, Sweden was a large European destination of South Korean children, adopting astir 10,000 of them since the 1960s.
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