Sweden to probe international adoptions amid worries over children taken from parents illegally

Swedes have reportedly adopted some 60,000 children since the 1950s, many of them from Asia and South America

Worries have been increasing that some of the children may have been stolen from their parents or bought by criminal networks

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In 2019, the largest number of international adoptions were from Asia. File photo: Reuters

Published: 8:38pm, 22 Feb 2021Updated: 8:38pm, 22 Feb 2021

Sweden on Monday said it would launch an investigation into how it conducted international adoptions until the 1990s amid growing concern that many children may have been taken from their biological parents illegally.

Swedes have adopted about 60,000 children from around the world since the 1950s, according to the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, many of them from Asia and South America.

Worries have been increasing, however, that some of the children may have been stolen from their parents or bought by criminal networks who then gave them up for adoption, with local authorities collaborating to provide false papers.

“We are going to need to investigate how adoption practices functioned in Sweden between the 1960s and the 1990s,” Health and Social Affairs Minister Lena Hallengren said in an interview with the newspaper.

Hallengren gave no further information about the investigation. Reports on irregularities in international adoptions have been surfacing for years.

In 2018, a commission in Chile looking into policies by which thousands of children from poor families were sent abroad between 1950 and 2000 said that many had been given away without the consent of their parents.

In some cases, mothers were told after they had given birth that their child had died, while in reality it had been taken to be put up for international adoption.