Stockholm - The Swedish Commission recommended that international adoption was suspended for decades after an investigation found a series of abuses and frauds.

Sweden is the latest country in charge of allegations of unethical conduct, especially in South Korea, which reviews its international adoption policy,

The committee was formed in 2021 after a report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter detailed the problematic international adoption system in Scandinavian countries. Monday's recommendation has been sent to Social Services Minister Camilla Waltersson Grönvall.

"The mission is to investigate irregularities that Swedish actors know that they could have done and actually did," said Anna Singer, a legal expert and head of the committee, in a press conference. "The actors include everyone involved in international adoption activities.

“It includes governments, supervisory authorities, organizations, municipalities and courts. The conclusion is that there are irregularities in international adoption in Sweden.”

The committee calls on the government to formally apologize to adopters and their families. Investigators found that confirmed cases of child trafficking, including from Sri Lanka, Colombia, Poland and China, every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Singh said that public apology, in addition to being important to those affected by individuals, can also help raise awareness of violations because of the tendency to download the existence and significance of abuse.

An Associated Press investigation, also documented by Frontline (PBS) last year, reported suspicious child collection habits and fraudulent paperwork involving South Korea’s foreign adoption program, which peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, a huge Western demand for babies.

The Associated Press and Frontline spoke with more than 80 adopters in the U.S., Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to reveal evidence of kidnapped or missing children eventually going abroad, fabricated child origins, babies transformed from one another, parents told their newborns were sick or dead, and only decades later they were sent to their new parents.

These findings challenge the international adoption industry, which is built on a model created in South Korea.

Last year, the Netherlands announced that it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from abroad. Denmark's only international adoption agency said it is closing and Switzerland apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoption. France issued a harsh assessment of its own culprit.

Over the past six decades, South Korea has sent about 200,000 children to adopt in the west, more than half of which have been housed in the United States along with France and Denmark, and Sweden is the main European destination for Korean children, with nearly 10,000 people adopted since the 1960s.