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 on Wednesday.
It should be checked whether there were "irregularities" in the procedures.
In recent years there have been repeated reports in the Swedish press about children with falsified adoption documents as well as about stolen or 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.
Adoption scandals in China
More than 4,000 children came to Sweden from 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 uncovered in China in recent years, including the abduction of children who were born in violation of the one-child policy, which has since been abolished, and who are said to have been referred to international adoption by officials.
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.