OhMyNews Article:
“I Will Haunt The Margins of Korean Society Like A Ghost Until Our Rights Are Restored”.
Posted to Paperslip on September 2nd, 2025.
Original Korean Article published on September 2nd, 2025.
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“I Will Haunt The Margins of Korean Society Like A Ghost Until Our Rights Are Restored”
National · International
2025.09.02 11:01 | Last Updated 2025.09.02 11:01
“I will haunt the margins of Korean society like a ghost until our rights are restored”
”[Interview] Professor Song Yeongjun (Anders Riel Müller), adopted to Denmark, criticizes Korea’s overseas adoption system and calls for justice
By Kim Seong-su (wadans)
Anders Riel Müller (Song Yeon-jun)
Anders Riel Müller, also known by his Korean name Song Yeon-jun, was adopted from Korea to Denmark in 1980 at the age of three. He is now an associate professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway, where he researches and teaches on the cultural political economy of sustainability and justice in Scandinavia and Korea.
Recently, Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) officially recognized 56 cases of overseas adoption as human rights violations. Müller, whose own case was among those acknowledged, spoke with a reporter via Facebook Messenger on September 1 about his experience and his views on Korea’s adoption system.
Between “Recognition” and “Disappointment”
Müller said of the TRC’s decision:
“While the TRC acknowledged human rights violations, it remains far too inadequate. It confirmed what many have long known—that the forced separation between adoptees and their birth families was not simply a tragic event, but illegal.”
However, he expressed deep disappointment that:
“These 56 cases are only the tip of the iceberg, compared to the 150,000–200,000 overseas adoptions. The investigation was too limited, and its recommendations mostly symbolic.”
He argued that the adoption system itself, by its very structure, constitutes a human rights violation. For him, the key question now is:
“What will the Korean government do next?”
Unresolved Issues: Lack of Transparency and Accountability
With 311 cases of alleged rights violations still unresolved, Müller called out the TRC’s lack of transparency and urgency, saying the commission must be held accountable. Many adoptees, he said, feel “abandoned once again,” this time by the very body created to investigate their rights violations.
While preparing his own lawsuit, Müller acknowledged that legal action alone cannot deliver justice:
“Lawsuits are just band-aids on a gaping wound. My aim is to raise awareness in Korean society and pressure the government to provide reparations for all adoptees.”
True justice, he argued, must be political and collective, extending even to adoptees who lack sufficient documents to pursue legal action.
Social Death and State Violence
Müller described the experience of being separated from family and Korean culture through adoption as a kind of “social death.” Comparing it to the Joseon-era punishment of exile, he explained:
“Adoption severed us from the language, kinship, memory, and places that give life meaning. We became socially nonexistent in Korea.”
Unlike exiles, who still knew their names and family histories, adoptees:
“Had our names changed, our histories falsified, and our citizenship stripped away.”
This, he said, was not mercy but “punishment without a crime.” He demanded accountability—not pity—from the Korean government.
Falsified Identities and Structural Injustice
On the widespread falsification of adoptees’ names and birth records, Müller argued this was not clerical error but deliberate state violence:
“The system intentionally fragmented our histories and destroyed or withheld documents that could help us recover our identities.”
This obstruction of memory, he said, is structural injustice. Adoptees are burdened with the impossible task of proving harm using falsified records produced by the very institutions now demanding evidence.
“Restorative justice must include archival justice. The government must answer for the records it manipulated and concealed.”
Children as “Export Goods”: The Economic Motive
Müller urged Korea to confront the reality that children were once treated as “export commodities.” Adoption agencies profited from selling children, while the state benefitted by reducing welfare costs.
“Restorative justice demands full accountability for this legacy. Reparations must be understood not as charity, but as compensation for the commodification of adoptees’ lives.”
He criticized the TRC’s largely symbolic recommendations and outlined concrete measures the Korean government should take:
Restore Korean nationality to all overseas adoptees, regardless of current citizenship or paperwork.
Open all adoption records, remove bureaucratic obstacles, and support adoptee-led family searches.
Provide financial support for adoptees wishing to resettle in Korea.
Compensate those whose families were coerced, or whose identities were falsified or erased.
Launch public education campaigns, build national memorials, and include survivor-led truth-telling efforts—so this history is never buried again.
Recognize adoptees not only as past victims but as key stakeholders in shaping future adoption policy.
The Cry of “Ghosts”: Unresolved Han
Drawing from Korean folklore, Müller likened adoptees to “ghosts”—souls unable to rest because of unresolved han (deep resentment).
“We were forcibly separated from our families, stripped of our names, histories, and citizenship, and condemned to live socially dead lives in foreign lands.”
But he declared:
“We will continue to haunt Korean society until justice is achieved.”
This haunting, he stressed, is political, not metaphorical:
“We are living evidence of a system that commodified children, erased identities, and exported citizens under the guise of humanitarianism. We are not ghosts, but citizens. Yet until our rights are restored and our histories reclaimed, we will remain—like ghosts—not out of vengeance, but necessity.”’
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Related Links:
Read the FULL original English interview with KSS Adoptee Song Yeongjun (Anders Riel Müller) here.
“Adoption as Banishment: Why Korea’s Adoptees Deserve More Than Symbolic Redress”
“The TRC recently confirmed human rights violations in 56 overseas adoption cases. What was your reaction to seeing your case officially recognized, and how did you feel about the scope of the investigation?
The TRC’s confirmation of my case as a human rights violation was both validating and yet at the same time so unfulfilling. I am just left with a huge question about what should come next? It confirmed what many of us have long known—that our separation from our families was not just tragic, but unlawful. Yet, the scope of the investigation is so limited and the recommendations are very symbolic and inadequate. Fifty-six cases are just the tip of the iceberg of the 150.000 – 200.000 overseas adoption cases.
Furthermore, I think that the way the adoption system operated made the entire system a violation of human rights.
With over 300 cases submitted to the TRC still unresolved, what are your thoughts on the Commission’s process and leadership as it relates to transparency and accountability?
With 311 cases still unresolved, the Commission’s leadership must be held accountable. The lack of transparency and urgency undermines the very mandate of truth and reconciliation. Many adoptees feel abandoned once again—this time by the very institution meant to investigate the violations committed against us.
Can you describe the immediate and long-term effects of being separated from your family and culture through overseas adoption?
Being separated from family, caretakers, and culture through overseas adoption is a rupture that constitutes a form of social death. Like historical banishment – a form of severe punishment during the Joseon dynasty - it severed us from the relational structures that give life meaning—language, kinship, memory, and place. We were not just relocated; we were rendered socially illegible in Korea.
This creates disorientation and loss. We were also expected to assimilate into a new identity while being denied access to our original ones. The long-term impact has been decades of cultural isolation, fractured identities, and the persistent labor of trying to reconstruct a history the adoption system did everything to conceal and erase.
How do you respond to the fact that many adoptees’ names and origins were falsified, and what challenges does this create for identity and documentation?
The falsification of names and origins is not merely a bureaucratic oversight—it is a deliberate act of state violence. It doesn’t make us rootless; we have roots. But it makes it nearly impossible to reconstruct our past. Our histories were fragmented by design, and the very documents that could help us reclaim our identities were altered, destroyed, or withheld.
This obstruction of memory is a structural injustice. It denies us access to truth, to family, and to the ability to understand how we ended up where we did. It also places an impossible burden on adoptees to prove harm with records that were falsified or erased by the very institutions now demanding evidence.
Restorative justice must include archival justice. The South Korean government must take responsibility for the records it manipulated and concealed. This means opening all adoption files, removing barriers to access, and creating mechanisms for truth verification that do not rely solely on documentation. It also means publicly acknowledging the role of state and private actors in producing false identities and enabling the erasure of adoptee histories.
Justice must be more than symbolic—it must be reconstructive. And that begins with restoring our right to know who we are, where we come from, and what was done to us.
South Korea government have been made prioritization of cost-saving and profit over citizen rights. In your view, what should the government’s response entail to truly acknowledge and rectify these injustices?
The South Korean government must confront the historical reality that children were treated as export commodities. The overseas adoption system was built on economic incentives—agencies profited, the state benefited from reduced welfare costs, and adoptees were sent abroad under the guise of humanitarianism while their families were left behind.
Restorative justice requires a full reckoning with this legacy. The government must publicly acknowledge that economic motives shaped adoption policy and led to widespread human rights violations. Reparations should include financial accountability—not as charity, but as restitution for the commodification of our lives.
This means funding for family reunification, support for returnees, and compensation for families who were coerced or misled. It also means investing in truth-telling processes that expose the economic architecture of the adoption system, and ensuring that future policies are built on human rights, not market logic.
Justice is not only about what happens now—it’s about repairing what was done then. The profit has already been made. The question is whether the state will now pay the moral debt it owes.
What role do you believe economic motives played in shaping Korea’s overseas adoption policies, and how should these be confronted in any future reparations or policies?
I think I have answered that in question 5
The TRC’s recommendations have been described as “symbolic.” What concrete actions or reparations do you believe are needed for meaningful justice for adoptees and their families?
The TRC’s recommendations, while a step forward, remain largely symbolic. What’s missing is a framework of tangible redress—actions that directly address the harm experienced by adoptees and their families. Recognition alone does not repair what was broken.
Concrete measures should have included the restoration of South Korean citizenship for all overseas adoptees, regardless of current nationality or documentation status. There should have been clear commitments to open all adoption records, remove bureaucratic barriers to access, and fund family tracing efforts led by adoptees themselves.
The Commission could have proposed financial support for those seeking to return and resettle in Korea, including housing, language education, and employment assistance. It could have recommended compensation for families who were coerced or misled, and for adoptees whose identities were falsified or erased.
Public education campaigns, national memorials, and adoptee and family-led truth forums should have been part of the recommendations—tools to ensure that this history is not buried again. And most importantly, adoptees should have been named as key stakeholders in shaping future adoption policy, not just subjects of past harm.
Are you pursuing individual legal action, and do you feel that lawsuits alone can offer justice or address the broader harm mentioned in the TRC findings?
I am preparing a lawsuit, but I am under no illusion that legal action alone can deliver justice. Lawsuits are a patch on a gaping wound. Justice must be political, collective, and inclusive of those who cannot pursue legal avenues due to lack of documentation.
What I do hope is that individual legal action can raise awareness and gain publicity in South Korea. It may hopefully help us to pressure the government to take proper action and establish different forms of reparations and redress for all adoptees.
The majority of overseas adoptees lack documentation to prove wrongdoing. How can justice efforts be structured to support these individuals who do not have official evidence?
The TRC’s reliance on documentation to verify human rights violations presents a cruel irony: the very system under investigation was built on falsifying, fabricating, and destroying those documents. Adoptees were stripped of their names, origins, and citizenship through deliberate acts of bureaucratic erasure. Many were assigned fictitious family names like “Hanyang” to classify them as orphans, even when they had living parents. In some cases, records were altered to obscure consent, or destroyed entirely to facilitate export.
To require documentation as proof of injustice is to demand evidence from victims of a system designed to eliminate it. It excludes the majority of adoptees from recognition and redress—not because the injustice they experienced is less valid, but because the state and adoption agencies ensured it would be undocumented.
Justice must not be contingent on paperwork. It must be grounded in the recognition of systemic patterns, adoptee and family testimony, and the historical context of mass displacement. Mechanisms for redress must be inclusive of those whose records are incomplete. This includes alternative pathways to truth verification, such as oral histories, community corroboration, and adoptee-led and family-led investigations.
The TRC’s approach risks reinforcing the very violence it was meant to expose. If documentation is the only gateway to justice, then the system’s success in erasing our histories becomes its shield against accountability. That is the paradox—and it must be dismantled.
How would you like to see adoptees themselves included in policy-making and discussions about reparations and future adoption protocols?
Policy-making around adoption and reparations must not be designed in isolation from those most affected. Adoptees have long been treated as passive subjects—spoken for, studied, and legislated over. That must end. We are not just witnesses to injustice; we are experts in its lived consequences. Our insight is essential to crafting policies that are ethical, effective, and reparative.
But it’s not only adoptees who must be included. Our families—those who lost children, grandchildren, siblings, uncles, and aunts—must also have a seat at the table. Their voices have been silenced for decades. Many parents were told their children had died, or were pressured into relinquishment under false pretenses. Their grief, their knowledge, and their demands for justice are just as central to this reckoning.
Policy-making must be participatory, family-and-adoptee-led, and rooted in the lived realities of those most affected. This includes shaping protocols for future adoptions, designing reparations, and overseeing truth and reconciliation processes. Anything less risks repeating the paternalism that enabled these violations in the first place.
We are not asking to be consulted—we are demanding to be included in discussing reparations.
You compared overseas adoption to historical banishment in Korea. How do you think this framing affects public understanding, and what changes in public awareness do you hope to see?
I draw on the Joseon dynasty’s penal code to frame overseas adoption as a form of banishment—not metaphorically, but structurally. In that era, banishment was considered the harshest punishment short of death. It meant being stripped of one’s place in society, severed from family, community, and identity. It was a form of social death.
Overseas adoption mirrors this punishment, but in many ways, it is even more severe. Those banished under Joseon law still knew who they were. They retained their names, their family histories, and their sense of origin. Adoptees, by contrast, were not only removed from their families and homeland—we had our names changed, our histories falsified, our citizenship revoked. The system didn’t just sever us from our roots; it actively worked to make those roots irrecoverable.
We were reclassified as orphans, assigned fictitious family names like “Hanyang,” and scattered across the globe with no means of return. The violence was not just in the separation—it was in the deliberate erasure of identity and the bureaucratic machinery designed to make reconstruction nearly impossible.
By invoking the concept of banishment, I hope to shift public understanding away from sentimental narratives of loss and shame toward a recognition of the profound injustice we and our families endured. This was not benevolence—it was punishment without crime. And it demands not pity, but accountability.
As overseas adoptees continue to “haunt Korea’s national conscience,” what message would you like to send to Korean society, policy-makers, and adoption agencies at this moment of reckoning?
In Korean folklore, Gwisin (귀신) are spirits who linger among the living, not out of malice, but because their unfinished business has yet to be resolved. They haunt not to harm, but to remind. Overseas adoptees are much like Gwisin. We were severed from our families, stripped of our names, histories, and citizenship—rendered socially dead—doomed to live out our lives in a state of displacement, scattered far from the place we once belonged. Yet we persist on returning to the living in Korea. And we will continue to haunt Korean society until our justice is achieved.
This haunting is not metaphorical—it is political. We are the living reminders of a system that commodified children, erased identities, and exported citizens under the guise of humanitarianism. We are not voiceless victims of a brutal system; we are evidence and we speak up. And our presence unsettles the national conscience because it forces Korea to confront what it tried to forget.
Unlike the Gwisin of folklore, we do not seek rituals to send us away. We seek recognition, accountability, and repair. Our unfinished business is not spiritual—it is historical, legal, and moral. Korea cannot move forward until it reckons with the lives it displaced, the families it fractured, and the truths it buried.
We are not ghosts—we are citizens. But until our rights are restored and our histories reclaimed, we will remain in the margins, haunting not out of vengeance, but out of necessity.”