South Korea's justice minister has pledged to expand access to judicial remedies for victims of state-led abuses, including foreign adoptees whose adoptions were marred by widespread fraud under previous military governments.

Using unusually strong language for a senior South Korean official, Justice Minister Jung Sung-ho said the country’s past adoptions amounted to “forced child trafficking” and that the government would largely refrain from appealing rulings in cases brought by victims seeking compensation for government wrongdoing.

Jung was speaking on Thursday in a roundtable interview with selected journalists.

Hundreds of Korean adoptees in the West have already requested that their cases be investigated by a fact-finding commission reviewing past human rights violations.

The body was relaunched in February after its previous mandate ended in November.

That earlier Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the government bore responsibility for an adoption programme riddled with fraud and malfeasance, driven by efforts to cut welfare costs and carried out by state-authorised private agencies that systematically manipulated children’s origins.

Some adoptees hope the commission’s findings will provide legal grounds for damages lawsuits against the government or their adoption agencies.

But victims of other government abuses recognised by the commission have often been locked in lengthy legal battles after state prosecutors appealed rulings in their favour, citing expired statutes of limitations or deeming the commission’s findings inconclusive.

Jung, a close ally of President Lee Jae-myung, who in October issued an apology over past adoption problems, said the government is willing to expand legal redress and speed compensation for victims of government abuses whose cases have been verified by the truth commission.

Under a new law that took effect in February giving those victims a three-year window to sue for damages even after statutes of limitations had expired, Jung’s ministry, which represents the government in lawsuits, said last week it plans to withdraw time-limit appeals in more than 800 cases.

Jung said the ministry plans to extend a similar approach to lawsuits by adoptees in the future.

“Once the truth commission firmly establishes the basic facts [regarding the abuses], we intend to co-operate to ensure the process moves swiftly,” Jung said.

Some adoptees, including Kim Yoo-ree, who was sent to a French family in 1984 without her biological parents’ consent and says she was abused by her adopters, have sought compensation under the state compensation act, which in theory allows victims to pursue claims without lengthy court battles.

But while the Justice Ministry technically has four weeks to decide on the requests, it has failed to do so for more than six months, according to the adoptees’ lawyer, Choi Jung-kyu.

Jung said he would instruct officials to address the delays but does not see a need for a separate new process to expedite compensation, as called for by some advocates.

South Korea sent thousands of children annually to the United States, Europe and Australia from the 1970s to the early 2000s, peaking at an average of more than 6,000 a year in the 1980s.

The country was then ruled by a military government that saw population growth as a major threat to its economic goals and treated adoptions as a way to reduce the number of mouths to feed. (AP)



Edited by Tony Sabine