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Family with children (symbol image)
Photo: Frank Leonhardt / picture-alliance / dpa
Following reports of forced adoptions and child abductions, Sweden is reviewing all of the country's international adoption procedures over the past 70 years.
It is mainly about adoptions from China and Chile, as Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren said.
It should be checked whether there were "irregularities" in the proceedings.
In the past few years there had been repeated reports in the Swedish media about children with forged adoption documents as well as about abducted children and forced adoptions.
Since the mid-1960s, around 60,000 children from abroad have been placed in Sweden for adoption, most of them from South Korea, India, Colombia and Sri Lanka.
More than 4,000 children came to Sweden from China.
Adoption scandals in China
According to research by the newspaper "Dagens Nyheter", the Chinese authorities often stated that the babies had been abandoned by their parents.
In fact, however, several adoption scandals had been exposed in China in recent years, including the abduction of children.
In China at that time the so-called one-child policy still applied, families were only allowed to have one child.
If more children were born in one family, they were apparently placed by officials for international adoption.
In Chile, a special investigator has been investigating alleged illegal adoptions during the period of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990 since 2018.
The international adoptions to Sweden are now to be examined under the direction of family law expert Anna Singer from Uppsala University.
The result of the tests is to be presented in November 2023.
ptz / AFP