Thousands of children adopted to Sweden may have been taken from their biological parents illegally, according to a government investigation.
A Swedish government commission has recommended halting all international adoptions after an investigation found that decades of illegal adoptions amounted to child trafficking involving state authorities and adoption agencies.
At a press conference in Stockholm, Social Services Minister Camilla Waltersson Gronvall told the Swedish language Epoch Times on June 2: “[There are] appalling cases of deficient background information, and even children simply being stolen from their parents.”
“There has been an unreasonable level of trust in the governments of the countries of origin for the children adopted to Sweden.”
According to Human Rights Watch, roughly 60,000 people have been adopted into Sweden. It started with children from South Korea in the 1950s, and then grew to include China, Chile, Ethiopia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, peaking in the mid 1970-1980s. By the early 2000s, the numbers began to steadily decline.
Amid growing concerns that adopted children may have been taken from their biological parents illegally, the commission found confirmed cases of child trafficking spanning every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Head of the inquiry Anna Singer, professor of civil law, told The Epoch Times that this practice is “winding down by itself.”
“Last year, 54 children were adopted to Sweden [from abroad]. … Many countries have ceased putting children up for intercountry adoption.”
“Adoption agencies are not a sustainable solution for meeting the needs of these children,” she added. “It’s better to try to improve conditions in their countries of origin. Intercountry adoption may have worked to slow down such efforts.”
China in the Spotlight
The final two-volume report released on June 2, the result of a probe which started in 2021, said that Swedish adoption organizations “have taken great risks by operating in China, which has been a closed country with very limited opportunities for transparency throughout the period.”
It said that all children adopted from China were described as abandoned and lacked any background history, making it difficult, or impossible, to assess whether the adoptions were in the child’s best interest.
“Chinese authorities have confirmed that four adoptions to Sweden were linked to the systematic child trafficking in Hunan that was exposed in 2005. However, it cannot be ruled out that more Swedish adoptions are affected by the child trafficking in China,” it said.
By Owen Evans
