The Dutch government suspended adoptions from foreign countries on Monday after an investigative committee report criticised past ruling coalitions for being “too passive” in the face of years of reported abuses including impoverished mothers being coerced into putting up their children for adoption.

The committee said that abuses included “the falsification of documents, the abuse of poverty among the birth mothers and the abandonment of children for payment or through coercion”.

Dutch media began reporting on them in the late 1960s, but previous governments failed to take decisive action to tackle the problems, it added.

“Not only have there been many abuses in the past, the system of inter-country adoption is still open to fraud and abuses continue to this day,” the government-installed committee warned.

It said that the government needs to “restore its damaged relationship with adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents and families.” Minister for legal protection Sander Dekker conceded that Dutch governments had fallen short.

Governments “should have taken a more active role in preventing abuses and that is a painful conclusion,” Dekker said. “For this, apologies are in order.”