South Korea’s truth commission has concluded that the government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and enabled by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins.

The largest exporter of international adoptees allowed fraud to flourish, as the government pushed the adoption agenda

South Korean governments committed numerous human rights violations over decades in a controversial programme that sent at least 170,000 children and babies abroad for adoption, a landmark inquiry has found.