Photo : YONHAP News
The family of a girl who went missing in 1975 is suing the South Korean government after learning 44 years later that she was adopted overseas.
A children’s rights group and the family’s legal team held a press conference Monday announcing the lawsuit, explaining that the government had pushed overseas adoption and made few efforts to find the parents of missing children.
The parents and two siblings are suing the state, the orphanage that housed the girl and the adoption agency for a total of 600 million won, or over 444-thousand U.S. dollars.
The four-year-old girl went missing in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, in 1975 and her family searched for her for decades before finding out that she’d been adopted and raised in the United States.
This is the first lawsuit seeking to hold the government responsible for allowing a missing child to be adopted overseas without looking for her parents.