# Swedish inquiry recommends ending international adoptions after decades of abuse and fraud

Event date: 2025-06-02

A Swedish commission has recommended that international adoptions be stopped after finding abuses and fraud stretching back decades, including confirmed cases of child trafficking in every decade from the 1970s through the 2000s.

The commission’s findings land as Sweden becomes the latest country to reassess the ethics and oversight of its foreign adoption system. According to the Associated Press report, the inquiry was formed in 2021 after a report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter exposed problems in the country’s adoption practices.

Anna Singer, who led the investigation, said the commission examined whether Swedish actors knew about irregularities, could have acted, and in fact did act. Her framing points to the breadth of the inquiry, which included the government, supervisory authorities, organizations, municipalities and courts.

The commission concluded that irregularities did occur in Sweden’s international adoptions. It recommended that the government formally apologize to adoptees and their families, saying such a move would matter both to people directly affected and to broader public understanding of what happened.

The report also identified confirmed cases of child trafficking from Sri Lanka, Colombia, Poland and China. That detail is especially significant because it suggests the problems were not isolated to one sending country or one era, but were repeated across multiple decades and systems.

The AP report places Sweden’s inquiry inside a broader international reckoning. In March, South Korea’s truth commission concluded that its government bore responsibility for a foreign adoption program marked by fraud and abuse. The Netherlands has already moved to stop its citizens from adopting from abroad, Denmark’s only international adoption agency has shut down, Switzerland has apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoptions, and France has issued its own critical assessment.

The Swedish commission’s recommendation is also notable because it does not simply call for reforms. It calls for an end to the system itself, at least in its current form. That is an unusually direct response to the findings and one that reflects how deeply trust in international adoption has eroded in parts of Europe and Asia.

The AP account says the broader model of international adoption has been challenged by previous investigations into South Korea’s foreign adoption program, which sent around 200,000 children to the West over six decades. More than half of those children were placed in the United States.

Sweden has been one of the major European destinations for children adopted from South Korea. The AP report says nearly 10,000 South Korean children were adopted by Swedish families since the 1960s.

That history helps explain why the commission’s recommendations matter beyond Sweden. The findings raise questions not only about what happened in one country, but about the wider infrastructure that allowed children to be transferred across borders with weak oversight and, in some cases, fraudulent paperwork.

For Sweden, the next step now lies with the government. Minister of Social Services Camilla Waltersson Grönvall said her department would review the report, according to AP. The political question is whether the findings will lead only to a formal apology or to a structural break with international adoption as a policy.

The commission’s message is that the past abuses were not accidental side effects. They were systemic enough to warrant a broad institutional reckoning and serious enough to justify stopping the practice altogether.

*Source: AP 5414*