Korean Laws
Special Adoption Act 2012 입양특례법 No. 11007
After consultation with adult Korean adoptees and single mothers’ groups, the Special Adoption Act was passed in 2011 and enacted in the summer of 2012. The Act aimed to enforce the right of a child to be brought up by their biological family (Art 3.1), to reduce overseas adoptions (Art 8) and promote domestic adoption (Art 7).
The Act also provides conditions which must be met in order for a birth parent to legally relinquish a child for adoption.
A child can only be relinquished from 7 days after its birth (Art 13.1)
Birth parents must receive counselling and be made aware of financial support that is available to them if they choose to keep their child. They must also be made aware of the permanent, legal effect of the adoption. (Art 13.3)
Adoptions are also required to be approved of and finalised in the Family Court. (Art 11) This article requires the child’s birth registration document for the child to be eligible for adoption. Such a document would tie the mother administratively to the child. However, the administrative connection would disappear once the child was adopted in the Court. Prior to this, adoptions were finalised in the adoptive country and there was no judicial oversight in matters like consent of the birth parents or suitability of the adoptive parents. Mothers were also able to relinquish their children without providing a birth certificate or birth registration document.
Korean Adoption Services (KAS) 중앙입양정보원
The Special Adoption Act also provided for the startup of a service for promotion of domestic adoption and post-adoption services (Art 26). Post-adoption services include birth family search and facilitating access to records.
KAS was also charged with setting up a database of adoptee and birth parent information that could be used for birth family search.
KAS was formally dissolved and became part of the NCRC in August 2024 (Child Welfare Act 2024 Supplementary Article 5).
National Center for the Rights of the Child (NCRC) 아동권리보장원
The National Center for the Rights of the Child was established in 2019. It was tasked with handling not just adoption matters, but a range of matters related to child welfare and protection.
The role of KAS was subsumed by NCRC in 2024, but from what I can tell the staff of the two organisations were working together or under the same roof from the start of NCRC’s operation. I personally had contact with KAS/NCRC in 2019 and it wasn’t really clear which organisation the people I was communicating with worked for.
In 2024, the NCRC was exposed as having entrusted and paid an incompetent third party company to digitise adoptee records from orphanages around the country, over a decade long period. A whistle-blower from within the NCRC reported significant issues with the way that the information was being collected and stored. Because of the many instances of incompetence and carelessness from both the third party company and staff in the NCRC, records have most likely been lost or obscured. This incident has engendered a lot of mistrust among adoptees, as it reflects the organisation’s lack of care and respect for us and our records. It has added to the intense scepticism over whether the NCRC will serve our community well or whether our adoption agency records, the strongest link to our birth families and possibility of reunion as well as our identities and histories, will also be improperly handled and at risk of getting lost or destroyed.
From July 2025, the NCRC will formally take over birth family search, file reviews and issuing of documents such as Adoption Certificates which are used when proof of adopted status is required, like applying for the F4 visa, language scholarships or submission of DNA. These processes will no longer be handled by the private adoption agencies as they have been for decades.
In the past and to the present day, Korean adoptees returning to Korea in search of family and answers have often been met with stonewalling and dishonesty from the agencies. They are able to hide behind strict privacy laws to prevent us accessing information about us. Our own files with the only known information on our Korean histories and families have in many cases been denied to us by the staff of the four Korean adoption agencies. In some cases, the agency staff have been helpful and facilitated reunions with birth families, but in other cases they have been the very opposite. The inconsistency and lack of professionalism in the service provided has been an ongoing issue. At this point, the scope to advocate for ourselves is very limited. We have little choice or control when it comes to our records. We will now watch our documents be moved to the NCRC, an organisation which in its short history has a track record of carelessness, incompetence and most likely corruption. But we must hope for a better outcome than what we have experienced with the private agencies.
New Korean Legislation in 2025
From what I can tell, there are three key pieces of Korean legislation or amendments to existing laws that will come into effect on July 19 2025.
Special Act on International Adoptions 국제입양에 관한 법률 No. 19553
Child Welfare Act 아동복지법 No. 20218
Special Act on Domestic Adoptions 국내입양에 관한 특별법 No. 20218
The three laws will work together to change how adoptions are handled and the way adoptee records are held and accessed.
Special Act on International Adoptions
The Special Act on International Adoptions says explicitly in Article 1 that it is the vehicle by which Korea is implementing the Hague Adoption Convention.
In Article 5, the Ministry of Health and Welfare is specified as Korea’s “Central Authority.”
Article 17 provides that adopted people can make a request to the NCRC for disclosure of their Adoption Information. In the existing Special Adoption Act, the wording also includes requests to “adoption agencies.” (Article 36 (2)) but that option is no longer available in the new law.
Supplementary Provisions (July 2023) Article 2 provides that this request can be made by people adopted before the enforcement of the Special Act on International Adoptions. So it applies to ALL Korean adoptees.
Article 28 allows the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Director of the NCRC to request data and documents from the agencies and other organisations and institutions for purposes of performing duties under the Special Act on International Adoptions.
Child Welfare Act
The Child Welfare Act in Article 10-2 (9) outlines the duties of the NCRC specifically relating to adoption. Most specific to records access is the fourth point (라) “Work related to requesting disclosure of adoption information.”
Article 15-2 gives detail about the Integrated Child Information System (아동통합정보시스템). I don’t really know what this is, but it appears to be a digitised system that will gather information from various organisations and stakeholders concerned with child welfare. The information can then be stored in a centralised place and services from various organisations can be linked. I assume this is part of the system that the NCRC was digitising the orphanage records for.
The Minister of Health and Welfare is given the power to collect information necessary for establishing the Child Information System. Relevant to adoptions is “Information held by child welfare facilities” and “Information on adopted children according to the “Special Act on Domestic Adoption” and the “Act on International Adoption”
So it appears that this framework of laws gives the Ministry of Health and Welfare greater power to compel private organisations like the adoption agencies to hand over documents and records.
Special Act on Domestic Adoptions
Finally, the Special Act on Domestic Adoptions, in Article 33 provides the ability for adoptees to apply for Disclosure of Adoption Information. The terms are very similar to the ones in the current Special Adoption Act, with some differences.
A person adopted pursuant to this Act may request the Director of the Child Rights Protection Center to disclose adoption information related to him/her
The request can only be made to the NCRC, not the adoption agencies.
The head of the Child Rights Protection Center who receives the request under Paragraph 1 shall disclose without delay the adoption information held with the consent of the biological parents. However, if the consent of the biological parents cannot be confirmed or the biological parents do not consent, the adoption information shall be disclosed excluding the personal information of the biological parents.
This article includes the words “without delay” which are not present in the current law. It remains to be shown how this will be interpreted and applied.
Notwithstanding the proviso of Paragraph 2, in cases where the biological parents are unable to consent due to death or other reasons, and there are special reasons such as medical needs of the adopted person, adoption information may be disclosed regardless of the consent of the biological parents.
This part seems to require that if there is no consent from the birth parent, their personal information may be disclosed but only if they have died or are unable to give consent AND there is a special reason, such as a medical reason. This is a rather high threshold to reach. It basically requires that the birth parent be dead AND that the adoptee is suffering from a medical condition, for it to apply.
Alright, I’m going to leave it there. This was all a bit dry and boring, but I wanted to understand the changes that are happening this year. I will try to write more if and when there are any updates.
