TEDx New Delhi: Speaking for Ukraine’s Abducted Children

Because silence is never an option.

Emile Foundation CEO Mariam Lambert recently took the stage at TEDx New Delhi to speak about one of the gravest human rights violations of Russia’s war in Ukraine: the forced deportation of Ukrainian children.

Watch the extract here:

A different kind of stage

Mariam has spoken on behalf of the Emile Foundation at conferences, universities, summits, and institutions around the world. Every stage has served the same purpose: ensuring that the stories of Ukraine’s abducted children are not forgotten.

TEDx was different. Where humanitarian and policy conferences reach an audience already engaged with the issue, TEDx reaches far beyond it — opening the conversation to people who may never have encountered this crisis at all.

That reach mattered even more given where the talk took place. India has longstanding diplomatic and economic ties to Russia, and conversations about Russian conduct in Ukraine are not always easy ones to have there. But as Mariam put it: human rights should never depend on politics, geography, or convenience. Some conversations are difficult. They remain necessary.

“Humanity is not lost when violence starts”

At the center of the talk is a line that captures the Foundation’s entire philosophy:

“Humanity is not lost when violence starts. Humanity is lost when suffering becomes normal.”

War itself does not erase humanity. What erodes it is the slow process by which atrocity becomes routine — where each new report of harm is met with less shock than the last, until suffering stops registering as urgent at all.

Every time the world stops reacting to injustice, every time forced deportation is quietly filed away as simply “part of war,” it becomes easier for the next case to go unnoticed — and harder for the children still waiting to come home.

Behind every case file, a child

The scale of this crisis is difficult to hold in view. Behind the numbers — the cases, the reports, the investigations — are individual children, each with a name, a family, a birthday, a home, and a future that has been interrupted.

This is the work the Emile Foundation carries out every day: identifying children who have been forcibly deported, investigating individual cases, documenting evidence, supporting the families left waiting, and working with neutral authorities to help bring children home.

It is not political work. It is the defense of a single, fundamental principle — that every child has the right to live safely with their family.

We will keep speaking

The Emile Foundation has now brought this message to conferences and institutions across many countries. Bringing it to the TEDx stage means reaching an even wider, more global audience — including people encountering this crisis for the very first time.

That is precisely the point. As Mariam said in closing: silence is never an option. The Emile Foundation will continue advocating wherever and whenever it can, until every Ukrainian child is back where they belong.