SOUTH KOREA’S president apologised today for poorly managed foreign adoption programmes that were rife with abuses and fraud, months after the country’s truth commission admitted state responsibilities for such practices for the first time.

President Lee Jae Myung said in a Facebook post that he was offering “heartfelt apology and words of comfort” on behalf of the country to South Koreans adopted abroad and their adoptive and birth families.

Findings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and recent court rulings have confirmed some cases of human rights abuses in the course of international adoptions, Mr Lee said, saying that the government failed to play its role in such cases.

Mr Lee said he “feels heavy-hearted” when he thinks about “anxiety, pain and confusion” that South Korean adoptees would have suffered when they were sent abroad as children.

He asked officials to formulate systems to safeguard the human rights of adoptees and support their efforts to find their birth parents.

South Korea has faced growing pressure to address widespread fraud and abuse that plagued its adoption programmes, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s when the country allowed thousands of children to be adopted each year.

Many adoptees discovered their records were falsified to portray them as abandoned orphans, while others were carelessly removed, or even stolen, from their birth families.