SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Nearly 300 South Koreans who were adopted to European and American parents as children have so far filed applications demanding South Korea’s government to investigate their adoptions, which they suspect were based on falsified documents that laundered their real status or identities as agencies raced to export children.

The Denmark-based group representing the adoptees also called for South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to prevent agencies from destroying records as they face increasing scrutiny about their practices during a foreign adoption boom that peaked in the 1980s. 

The 283 applications submitted to Seoul’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission through Tuesday describe numerous complaints about lost or distorted biological origins, underscoring a deepening rift between the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees and their birth nation decades after scores of Korean children were carelessly removed from their families. 

Peter Møller, attorney and co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, said he also plans to sue two Seoul-based agencies – Holt Children’s Services and Korea Social Services – over their unwillingness to fully open their records to adoptees. 

While agencies often cite privacy issues related to birth parents to justify the restricted access, Møller accuses them of inventing excuses to sidestep questions about their practices as adoptees increasingly express frustration about the limited details in their adoption papers that often turn out to be inaccurate or falsified.

Møller’s group last month initially filed applications from 51 Danish adoptees calling for the commission to investigate their adoptions, which were handled by Holt and KSS.

The move attracted intense attention from Korean adoptees from the world, prompting the group to expand its campaign to Holt and KSS adoptees outside of Denmark. The 232 applications additionally filed on Tuesday included 165 cases from Denmark, 36 cases from the United States and 31 cases combined from Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany.

The commission, which was set up in December 2020 to investigate human rights atrocities under military governments that ruled South Korea from the 1960s to 1980s, must decide in three or four months whether to open an investigation into the applications filed by adoptees. If it does, that could possibly trigger the most far-reaching inquiry into foreign adoptions in the country, which has never fully reconciled with the child export frenzy engineered by its past military leaders.

While the commission’s deadline for applications comes in December, Møller said his group will try to persuade the commission to accept more adoptions from adoptees on a rolling basis if it decides to investigate the cases.