According to a Dutch Documentary, Sri Lankan authorities have admitted that thousands of babies born were fraudulently sold for adoption overseas in the 1980s.
A BBC report quoting the documentary said up to 11,000 children could have been sold to Europe, with both parties being given fake documents.
Some were reportedly born into "baby farms" that sold children to the west. Sri Lanka's health minister told the Dutch current affairs programme Zembla he would set up a DNA database to help children find their birth mothers, the report claimed.
About 4,000 children are thought to be have been relocated to families in the Netherlands, with others going to other European countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the UK.
One adoptee called Rowan van Veelen, told the BBC earlier this year that he had travelled back to Sri Lanka to try and find his birth mother 27 years on.
He was part of a Netherlands-based social media network that tried to match Sri Lankan birth mothers to their estranged adopted children.
"The adopted children and the mothers got the wrong information, which makes it really hard," he explained.
The Dutch filmmakers from Zembla started looking into the allegations after the Dutch Council for the Administration of Criminal Justice and Protection of Juveniles advised the government in November 2016 to consider banning foreign adoptions because of unethical practices in some of the children's origin countries.
Norbert Reinjens, a researcher for Zembla, told the BBC that they had found evidence that all kind of documents were falsified by adoption authorities - including birth certificates, the names of children and the identity of biological parents.
"In some institutions there were 'acting mothers' who were paid to pretend to be the biological parents while handing them over," he said.
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