Korea’s Adoptees Demand Justice Beyond Symbolism as Truth Commission Enters Third Phase

A Cautious Welcome: TRC3 and the Weight of History

When South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) renewed its mandate for a third term on January 29, it opened another chapter in the nation’s long struggle to confront the mass export of children that defined decades of its modern history. For the 56 overseas adoptees who received confirmation last May that their separations constituted human rights violations, the announcement evokes mixed emotions. Among them is Anders Riel Müller, who also goes by his Korean name Song Yeon-jun. Adopted from Korea to Denmark in 1980 at age three, Müller has spent decades understanding that his removal from his birth family was not merely tragic, but illegal.

The TRC’s second investigation, known as TRC2, marked the first time a South Korean state body officially recognized that the overseas adoption system violated fundamental rights. Yet for Müller and his fellow survivors, validation arrived wrapped in frustration. While the commission acknowledged systemic wrongdoing, it left over 300 submitted cases unresolved and excluded tens of thousands of adoptees who lack the documentation the commission demands as proof. The findings, though historically significant, offered recommendations that many survivors view as purely symbolic gestures rather than genuine pathways toward repair.

Müller, now an associate professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway, approaches TRC3 with carefully measured hope. His academic work focuses on sustainability and justice in Scandinavia and Korea, giving him a unique lens through which to view the commission’s limitations. He argues that without fundamental changes to how investigations proceed and how redress is defined, the new mandate risks repeating the patterns that rendered the previous phase inadequate. The question haunting survivors is whether political will exists to transform recognition into restoration, or whether the state will continue to treat adoption abuses as historical footnotes rather than active wounds requiring urgent care.

The Documentation Paradox: Evidence Destroyed by Design

The central flaw in the TRC’s investigative approach lies in its reliance on paperwork to verify harm. This requirement creates a cruel irony that survivors find deeply painful. The very system under investigation was architected to falsify, fabricate, and destroy the documents now being demanded as evidence. During the peak years of overseas adoption, which saw an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 children sent abroad, agencies routinely assigned fictitious origins such as “Hanyang” to classify children as orphans even when they had living parents. Workers altered records to obscure family relationships or destroyed files entirely to facilitate faster export.

To require documentation as proof of injustice is essentially to demand that victims produce evidence from a system designed to eliminate it. This methodological choice excludes the vast majority of adoptees from recognition and redress, not because the violations against them were less severe, but because the state ensured their experiences would leave no paper trail. Justice, Müller insists, cannot remain contingent on bureaucracy. It must instead be grounded in oral testimony, systemic patterns, and historical context. Without this shift, the TRC risks reinforcing the very violence it was created to expose.

The 56 confirmed cases represent only a fraction of those seeking acknowledgment. With 311 cases still pending review, many adoptees feel abandoned by the very body established to investigate their rights violations. The uncertainty extends beyond recognition into the realm of remedy. Some survivors have attempted to file lawsuits against the Korean government, only to find lawyers unsure how to proceed given the unprecedented nature of the TRC’s findings. Others have filed financial compensation claims, but decisions on these requests remain pending. This legal limbo illustrates the gap between symbolic acknowledgment and practical justice.

Banishment as Policy: Reframing Adoption as Social Death

To fully grasp the depth of harm inflicted through overseas adoption, survivors and scholars are urging a fundamental reframing of the practice. Rather than viewing adoption as humanitarian aid or economic necessity, they argue it should be understood as a form of banishment, one of the harshest punishments under the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty penal code. Historical banishment meant being stripped of one’s place in society, severed from family, community, and identity, and sent to distant territories to live out one’s days in isolation. It represented social death, a removal from the web of relationships that give life meaning.

Overseas adoption mirrors this ancient punishment, yet in crucial ways it proves even more severe. Those banished under Joseon law retained their names, histories, and knowledge of their origins. They knew who they were and where they came from, even if they could not return. Adoptees, by contrast, were removed from their families and homeland, then had their names changed, identities falsified, histories erased, and citizenship revoked. The system did not merely sever them from their roots; it actively worked to make those roots irrecoverable. Children were reclassified as orphans, scattered across the globe, and expected to assimilate into new identities while being denied access to their original selves.

The violence was not limited to physical separation. It extended into the bureaucratic machinery designed to make reunion nearly impossible. This was not benevolence or charity. It was punishment imposed upon people who had committed no crime. Müller describes this experience as “social death,” a term that captures the existential annihilation of being rendered socially nonexistent in one’s own homeland. The state did not just allow this to happen; it facilitated and profited from it, treating children as export commodities while reducing domestic welfare costs. This economic motive, hidden beneath the language of humanitarian rescue, demands accountability rather than pity.

Structural Injustice vs. Symbolic Gestures

The limitations of South Korea’s TRC become clearer when examined through the lens of structural injustice theory developed in other truth commission contexts. Academic analysis of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which addressed residential school abuses against Indigenous peoples, distinguishes between interactional injustice and structural injustice. Interactional justice focuses on specific harms between victims and perpetrators, often satisfied through compensation or individual acknowledgment. Structural justice requires examining the underlying social, political, and economic systems that created the conditions for mass victimization.

South Korea’s adoption crisis was not a series of isolated mistakes or individual bad actors. It was a structural system involving government agencies, private adoption businesses, and international partners operating within policies that prioritized export over family preservation. The TRC’s current approach largely addresses interactional injustice by confirming individual cases of wrongdoing and potentially offering financial compensation. However, it fails to dismantle the structural violence that rendered adoptees socially illegible in the first place.

Comparative research suggests that truth commissions often struggle to move beyond symbolic recognition toward structural transformation. Canada’s TRC produced 94 calls to action spanning child welfare, education, language, culture, health, and justice. Yet critics note that even comprehensive recommendations can entrench state power rather than challenge the colonial structures that enabled original abuses. For Korean adoptees, the risk is that financial compensation becomes a way to settle accounts without addressing the ongoing barriers to citizenship, family reunification, and cultural restoration. Compensation alone cannot repair the rupture of being severed from family, culture, and identity. It cannot restore the years lost to disorientation, cultural isolation, and the exhausting labor of reconstructing a history that the state worked actively to erase.

Commodification of Children: The Economic Reality

Behind the humanitarian rhetoric of rescue and Christian salvation narratives, overseas adoption operated as a business. Adoption agencies profited from selling children to Western families, while the South Korean state benefited from reducing welfare costs and removing “undesirable” populations from social statistics. This commodification of human lives transformed children into export goods, packaged with falsified paperwork and shipped to foreign markets. The economic incentives aligned perfectly to create a system where supply was manufactured to meet demand.

Müller and other activists argue that restorative justice must account for this legacy of commodification. Reparations cannot be understood as charity or benevolent gestures from a generous state. They must be recognized as compensation for the buying and selling of citizens, for the destruction of families to balance government budgets, and for the systematic erasure of identities to facilitate commerce. This requires more than individual payouts. It demands structural acknowledgment that the adoption industry was an economic system built on human rights violations.

The lack of transparency surrounding adoption records continues this commodification into the present day. Agencies and government offices still treat adoptees as products rather than rights-bearing citizens, controlling access to information about their own lives. The state’s refusal to open all adoption records, remove bureaucratic obstacles, and support family tracing efforts suggests an ongoing commitment to secrecy over justice. Until the government provides what survivors call “archival justice,” taking full responsibility for the records it manipulated and concealed, the economic exploitation of adoptees continues in the form of withheld truth.

The Gwisin Return: Haunting Korea’s Conscience

In Korean folklore, “gwisin” are spirits who linger among the living because of unfinished business, unresolved grievances that prevent their passage to the afterlife. Anders Riel Müller draws on this powerful metaphor to describe the position of overseas adoptees in contemporary Korean society. “We were severed from our families, stripped of our names and histories and rendered socially dead,” he explains. “Yet we persist in returning to Korea not out of vengeance, but out of necessity.” These returns take many forms: physical journeys to search for birth families, legal campaigns demanding recognition, academic research exposing systemic crimes, and public testimony forcing the nation to confront its buried past.

The gwisin metaphor captures the uncanny nature of adoptee presence in Korean consciousness. They are simultaneously citizens and strangers, family members and outsiders, living evidence of a system that commodified children and exported citizens under the guise of humanitarianism. Their presence unsettles the national conscience because it forces Korea to confront what it tried to conceal. Unlike the ghosts of folklore who seek rituals to send them away, adoptees seek recognition, accountability, and repair. Their unfinished business is not spiritual but historical, legal, and moral.

“We are not ghosts, but until our rights are restored and our histories reclaimed, we will remain in the margins, haunting Korea’s consciousness not out of malice, but seeking justice.”

This haunting is political rather than supernatural. Adoptees refuse to allow the adoption crisis to fade into comfortable historical distance. They appear at government offices, in courtrooms, at academic conferences, and in media coverage, insisting that the past is not past. Like the spirits of folklore who cannot rest until their wrongs are acknowledged, adoptees continue returning to the sites of their original banishment, demanding that the living account for the deadened lives they were forced to lead.

Restorative Justice: Concrete Demands for Systemic Change

Survivors have moved beyond requests for apology to demand specific structural reforms that would constitute genuine restorative justice. These demands are reconstructive rather than merely financial, aiming to restore what was destroyed rather than simply paying for the damage. First, they call for the restoration of South Korean citizenship to all overseas adoptees at government expense, regardless of current documentation status. This would reverse the involuntary revocation of nationality that accompanied their export.

Second, they demand complete opening of all adoption records, removal of bureaucratic barriers to access, and active state support for family tracing efforts. Third, they seek financial support for returnees including housing assistance, language education, and employment help, recognizing that many adoptees wish to rebuild lives in their homeland but face practical obstacles. Fourth, they demand compensation for birth families who were coerced or misled into surrendering children. Fifth, they insist on public education campaigns, national memorials, and adoptee-led forums to ensure this history is never buried again.

Most critically, survivors demand participation in shaping future policy. “We are not voiceless,” Müller states. “We are evidence.” Adoptee insight is essential to crafting policies that are ethical, effective, and truly reparative. Mechanisms for verifying violations must expand beyond documentation to include oral histories, community corroboration, and adoptee-led investigations. The state must stop treating survivors as passive recipients of charity and instead recognize them as stakeholders with expertise born of suffering.

Korea cannot move forward as a fully democratic society until it reckons with the lives it displaced, the families it fractured, and the truths it buried. The TRC3 represents an opportunity to move beyond the limitations of previous investigations, but only if accompanied by political courage and legislative action. Without these changes, the commission risks becoming another symbolic gesture, another delay in the long process of bringing the banished back into the fold of the living nation.

Key Points

• South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) renewed its mandate for a third term on January 29 to address overseas adoption abuses
• Only 56 of over 300 submitted cases have been confirmed as human rights violations, leaving thousands of adoptees without recognition
• Survivors criticize the TRC’s reliance on documentation, which was systematically falsified or destroyed by the adoption industry
• Adoptees frame overseas adoption as a form of “banishment” and “social death” more severe than historical Korean penal exile
• Demands include citizenship restoration, open adoption records, financial support for returnees, and compensation for coerced birth families
• Restorative justice must be reconstructive rather than merely symbolic or financial, addressing structural violence
• Adoptees use the Korean folklore concept of “gwisin” (restless spirits) to describe their persistent presence seeking unresolved justice