Eight South Korean adoptees sue Denmark over illegal adoptions and human rights violations

Eight people adopted into Danish families decades ago are now in court, seeking answers about how they came to be sent overseas and demanding the state acknowledge what went wrong. The adoptees, all brought to Denmark as young children in the 1970s and 1980s, filed suit in May 2026 claiming that Danish authorities knowingly failed to investigate the legality of their adoptions from South Korea. Each is seeking 250,000 kroner—roughly 50,000 Singapore dollars—in damages, totaling two million kroner across the group. Their lawyer, Viktor Kieler Herskind, framed the case as a fundamental breach of state responsibility: Denmark had an obligation to verify that these children were legally available for adoption, and it did not.

The scale of what happened in South Korea during those decades is staggering. Between 1955 and 1999, more than 140,000 South Korean children were sent abroad for adoption, many of them to Scandinavian and Western European families. For years, the circumstances surrounding these placements remained largely unexamined. But in 2025, Seoul's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released findings that exposed systemic abuse: fraudulent orphan registrations, tampering with children's identities, inadequate screening of adoptive parents, and birth parents whose legal consent was never properly obtained. In October 2025, the South Korean government apologized for the first time, acknowledging that state-sanctioned human rights violations had occurred.

Herskind argues that Danish officials were aware of these murky conditions in South Korea's adoption system, yet did nothing to protect the children being placed in their country. The state should have actively investigated, he says. Instead, Denmark appears to have accepted adoptions without the due diligence that basic child protection would demand. The lawsuit invokes Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to private and family life—a right these adoptees claim was systematically denied them. Beyond the legal violations, Herskind points to another harm: Denmark did not ensure that adoptees could maintain contact with their country of origin, effectively severing them from their cultural and familial roots.

This case arrives amid a broader reckoning with international adoption practices. Similar lawsuits have been filed in other countries, though few have succeeded. The Netherlands stands as a notable exception: in 2022, a Dutch court ordered the state to pay damages and interest to a woman adopted from Sri Lanka in 1992, finding that the adoption had been conducted illegally. That precedent may offer some hope to the Danish plaintiffs, though outcomes remain uncertain. Denmark itself has already taken one step: in 2024, the country froze all international adoptions after serious problems with adoption practices came to light. The freeze suggests official recognition that something had gone badly wrong, even if the state has not yet fully reckoned with what happened to those already adopted decades earlier.