Korean Adoptees Owe A Debt Of Gratitude To Brothers Home Survivors For Pushing For Years To Make The Second Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC 2) Investigation A Reality.

Posted to Paperslip on August 18th, 2025.

With the renewed attention on Brothers Home of Busan survivors thanks to the recent Netflix Series “The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies”, which features the story of Brothers Home in the first two episodes, we have increasingly come to realize the debt owed to these Brothers Home survivors for pushing for years to get the Second Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC 2) Investigation to happen in the first place. TRC 2 was established on December 10th, 2020, largely in order to investigate the major concentration camps of S. Korea, which were operated under S. Korea’s previous series of brutal dictators. The TRC 2 investigation released an Interim Report regarding Overseas Adoption on March 26th, 2025, and the TRC 2 investigation as a whole concludes in late 2025. It was only thanks to the years long efforts by the Brothers Home survivors that the TRC 2 investigation began, and it was only on the back of this effort that the TRC 2 investigation into Overseas Adoption was made possible.

You can read about the Brothers Home survivors’ efforts to make TRC 2 a reality here:

The Reality Of What It Really Might Take For Korean Adoptees To Get A New Truth And ReconciliationCommission (TRC) 3

OhMyNews: In 2017, Victims of Brothers Home Walked 446.44 km to the Blue House To Demand Special Law

*Note — As of this writing on August 18th, 2025, TRC 3 has NOT been established by the Korean Government.

We don't think Adoptees realize what is owed to the Brothers Home survivors for their tremendous efforts to make the TRC2 investigation a reality. It is largely due to Brothers Home survivors that the TRC2 investigation began at all. The following is from an account by a female Brothers Home survivor, Lee Hye-yul, (born April 18, 1976), who after being freed from Brothers Home in 1987 after it was exposed, was transferred with her brother to “Namgwang Child Welfare Center in Nampo-dong, Busan”— or what what we colloquially refer to as “Nam Kwang Orphanage in Busan”.

While Lee Hye-yul ultimately was found (after years of searching) by her father and uncle at Namgwang Child Welfare Center, and was thus not adopted, she and her brother could easily have ended up being adopted overseas through KSS or Holt — the two major Korean Adoption Agencies with Namgwang / Nam Kwang supplied with children for overseas adoption. We have long had great interest in Nam Kwang as it was a major feeder orphanage (supplier of children) for KSS (Korea Social Service).

Lee Hye-yul is quoted in a 2019 Hankyoreh 21 article (which we have translated to English) as saying:

”The horrors of Brothers Home were forgotten until 2012, when Jong-sun Han (another Brothers Home survivor) held a solo protest in front of the National Assembly (Korea’s version of Congress), drawing renewed attention. The Committee was established in 2013. In 2014, lawmakers including Jin Sun-mi proposed a “Special Act on the Truth of the Brothers Home Incident,” and in 2017 a partial amendment to the “Basic Act on Past Incident Truth and Reconciliation” was proposed, but both bills remain stalled in the National Assembly. Survivors have continued a tent sit-in in front of the National Assembly for over 400 days, demanding the passage of these laws.”

*Paperslip Note: The TRC 2 Investigation began on December 10th, 2020.

I personally submitted summaries of Adoptees’ cases to the head of the TRC through a Korean contact on December 18th, 2020, becoming the first person to submit any cases of Overseas Adoptees to the TRC in history.

The official TRC 2 investigation into Overseas Adoption would not begin until December 7th, 2022.