Eight people adopted by Danish citizens from South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s are suing Denmark for allegedly denying them the right to their identity, origin and family life, their lawyer said on Monday.
In the lawsuit, the eight, who were all adopted when they were very young, claim Danish authorities should have known their adoptions were illegal and therefore did not fulfill their responsibility to protect them.
The plaintiffs have each sought 250,000 kroner in damages, for a total of two million kroner, citing article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights that refers to the respect of private and family life.
“The Danish state had an obligation to ensure that the children were legally allowed to be adopted from their birth families, and that was clearly not the case,” their lawyer Viktor Kieler Herskind told AFP.
The state should have “actively investigated” the adoption process in South Korea, he said.
He claimed successive Danish governments were aware of the murky conditions surrounding adoptions in the Asian country, which sent more than 140,000 children overseas for adoption between 1955 and 1999, according to an official South Korean inquiry.
In October 2025, Seoul apologized for the first time for state-sanctioned malpractices, saying “unjust human rights violations” were committed.
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in March 2025 that human rights violations had occurred in international adoptions of South Korean children, including “fraudulent orphan registrations, identity tampering, and inadequate vetting of adoptive parents”.
It also found “numerous cases where proper legal consent procedures” for South Korean birth parents “were not followed”.
Kieler Herskind said that Denmark also reportedly did not respect the adoptees’ right to maintain contact with their country of origin.
Several similar lawsuits have been filed around the world, but few have been successful.
In 2022, the Netherlands was ordered to pay damages and interest to a woman born in Sri Lanka in 1992 for acting “illegally” when she was adopted by a Dutch couple.
Denmark froze international adoptions in 2024 after a number of serious problems with international adoption practices came to light.
