Government investigations show that thousands of children employed in Sweden may have been illegally taken away by biological parents.
The Swedish Government Commission recommends halting all international recruitment after an investigation has revealed that there have been decades of illegal recruitment equivalent to child trafficking involving state authorities and adoption agencies.
At a press conference in Stockholm, Minister of Social Services, Camilla Walterson Gronborg, spoke to the Swedish Epoch Times on June 2.
“There was an unreasonable level of trust in the government of the children recruited in Sweden in their origins.”
Amid growing concern that adoptive children may have been illegally taken by biological parents, the committee found that confirmed child trafficking was confirmed every ten years from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Anna Singer, a civil law professor, told the Epoch Times that the practice was “engaged in its own right.”
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“Last year, 54 children were adopted in Sweden (from overseas).
Spotlight China
The final two-volume report released on June 2, the result of a survey launched in 2021, said that Swedish adoption organizations “take great risks by operating in China.
All children adopted from China were described as abandoned, lacking a background history and saying it was difficult or impossible to assess whether adoption was a child’s greatest concern.
“Chinese authorities have confirmed that four adoptions to Sweden are linked to systematic child trafficking in Hunan, which was exposed in 2005. However, we cannot rule out that Swedish adoptions are affected by child trade in China.”
Financial incentives were created as Chinese orphanages received compensation of between $3,000 and $5,000 per child placed for international recruitment. Swedish supervisors have found that orphanages rely on these fees.
In total, fewer than 4,300 adoptions have been implemented from China to date, making China the fourth largest country of origin for adoptions to Sweden in terms of total numbers.
Most adoptions occurred during the period 2000-2010 when more than 3,200 children were adopted from China to Sweden.
China is one of the few countries that approved adoption of infants as single children.
In many cases, documents signed by biological parents were missing, even if those parents were known. The file also often lacked the important details that adoptions needed to understand their origins.
“In the end it is the Swedish state that failed to protect the rights of children in international adoption activities. This means that the state needs to be held responsible for what happened and take steps to ensure that it never happens again,” the report states.
It encouraged official apology to adopt people and their families, provided financial aid, and supported those adopted to travel to the country of origin.
The Netherlands said in December that it would phase out international adoptions over the next six years after discovering that an official 2021 report was stolen or purchased from parents born back to the 1960s.
Switzerland also said in January it plans to terminate international recruitment amid similar concerns about abuse.
Epoch Times reporters Roger Thirlstrom, Reuters and the Press Association contributed to this report.
