Court orders agency to compensate adoptee over mishandled adoption
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA >> A South Korean court on Tuesday ordered the country's biggest adoption agency to pay 100 million won ($74,700) in damages to a 48-year-old man for mishandling his adoption as a child to the United States, where he faced legal troubles after surviving an abusive childhood before being deported in 2016.
However, the Seoul Central District Court dismissed Adam Crapser's accusations against the South Korean government, which he saw as responsible for creating an aggressive, profit-driven adoption industry that carelessly removed thousands of children from their families during a child export frenzy in the 1970s and `80s.
The civil case, tried for over four years, was the first in which a South Korean adoptee sued the country's government and a domestic adoption agency over fraudulent paperwork and screening failures.
Holt Children's Service, which handled Crapser's adoption to American parents in 1979, and South Korea's Justice Ministry, which represents the government in lawsuits, did not immediately comment.
In reading out the verdict, Judge Park Jun-min did not elaborate on why the court refused to hold the government accountable. Crapser's lawyers said they will review the full version of the ruling, which the court didn't immediately release, before deciding whether to appeal.
“We want to express our very serious regret,” said Kim Soo-jung, one of Crapser's lawyers.
“The (government) knew that children procured for adoptions were not being
(properly) protected, that their human rights were being violated — they should have done something about it, but they didn't. … It seems that the court simply saw the government as a monitoring institution, and not as an actor that directly committed illegal acts.”
Crapser, who left South Korea last year and currently lives in Mexico, did not attend the ruling.
It remains to be seen whether Crapser's case inspires more lawsuits by adoptees, who are becoming more vocal with their criticism of past South Korean corruption in adoption practices, which caused a huge but unknown number of wrongful family separations and stymied thousands from reconnecting with their roots.
Tuesday's verdict came months after hundreds of Korean adoptees from Europe and North America asked South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate their adoption circumstances. They say their status and identities were laundered to facilitate marred adoptions.
The commission has opened investigations of dozens of those applications and may take more cases in the coming months, as it proceeds with the most far-reaching inquiry into South Korea's foreign adoptions yet.