by Lynelle Long: online presentation to USKRG on 14 July 2026
Good morning everyone.
Thank you for inviting me to be here today.
My name is Lynelle Long. I was born in Vietnam and sent to Australia as an infant during the Vietnam War. For almost thirty years I’ve worked alongside fellow adoptees through my network, InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV), advocating for our rights at national and international levels.
Today, I’d like to invite you to think beyond adoption. Not beyond us adoptees or families but beyond the legal and social framework we’ve inherited because I believe we have reached a moment where simply reforming intercountry adoption is no longer enough. As more countries investigate our intercountry adoptions, we have an opportunity – and I would argue an obligation – to not only understand what went wrong, but to ask ourselves what should come next.
The question we ask now of governments needs to be:
How do we build a new child and family rights framework that truly respects the rights of everyone involved?
A while ago, one of the Chinese intercountry adoptees in my network shared about her reunion. After twelve years of searching, she finally found her first family. In doing so, she discovered they had been searching for her for thirty years. When they finally connected through DNA, her father sent heartbreaking messages sharing how they had never stopped looking. He told her they loved her and that she had been taken from them, not abandoned at all but taken against their will.
She hadn’t known any of this until her reunion. Like more than 160,000 Chinese intercountry adoptees sent away through intercountry adoption, she had grown up believing she had been abandoned but instead she has discovered she had been forcibly removed during China’s family planning era.
Her Chinese family had searched for three decades and she had travelled back to China multiple times looking for them. At one point she had been searching within a kilometre of where they were living. Neither knew how to find each other.
To most people, the reunion looks beautiful – something to celebrate. I celebrated too but what disturbed me wasn’t the reunion itself, it was what happened afterwards. As I read the many comments, almost everyone congratulated her, celebrating her perseverance, or spoke about what a wonderful outcome it was. Very few acknowledged the profound injustice that had made the reunion necessary in the first place. When I responded, I congratulated her too. I expressed how happy I was that she and her Chinese family had found each other, I acknowledged the wonderful support of her adoptive mother. But I also wrote about something else. I wrote about the decades of suffering her family had endured. I couldn’t stop thinking of her Chinese parents and the birthdays they’d missed, the years spent searching, the daughter they had never stopped loving. I wrote about trafficking, the forced separation, the lifelong human rights violations that had shaped all their lives.
Reunion is not justice – it is evidence that justice was absent.
Within minutes, I was asked to remove my comments. The concern seemed to be that I wasn’t in the spirit of celebrating the reunion. That moment stayed with me because it captured something I have witnessed repeatedly over nearly three decades of adoptee community building. This is not just about one social media post, it reflects something much deeper. A willingness to celebrate resilience while avoiding responsibility and to celebrate survival while avoiding accountability.
Why do we constantly celebrate reunion while remaining silent about the trafficking, coercion, document fraud, family separation and lifelong grief that preceded it? I believe it’s because acknowledging these truths makes many of us uncomfortable. It challenges the stories we’ve learnt and been told for decades: that we were abandoned, that adoption was rescue, that love alone can heal profound inequality.
Today we know much more! Investigations across countries such as Korea, Sri Lanka, Chile, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden continue to reveal trafficking, coercion, document falsification, state involvement, agency misconduct, and family separation. These are no longer isolated stories. They reveal structural global problems.
Many times people say, But they found each other. So it all worked out. But I say no. Reunion is not justice – it is evidence that justice was absent. Imagine if we changed only one fact – that the child that went missing was not an adoptee.
In reality, this has been the case. When I talk about the 2007 Madeleine McCann example of a child gone missing, presumed kidnapped and the huge global search that took place, imagine if she turned up and got reunited thirty years later. Would we celebrate? Absolutely! But would we stop there and not ask who was responsible? Would we expect the investigation to stop? Would we conclude everything turned out fine and that justice was not required because they’ve been reunited? Of course not. Yet somehow intercountry adoption is treated differently.
Sometimes people hear criticism like mine and assume that because I criticise the current system, I must be anti-adoption. Regardless of my personal beliefs, that is not the conversation I want us to focus on. The important conversation we need to have is whether the current legal model of plenary intercountry adoption is compatible with international human rights. The current system of plenary adoption is fundamentally built upon the principle of permanent legal substitution, i.e., it permanently replaces one identity with another, one family with another. It asks adoptees to lose our original identity, first family, kinship relationships, birth country citizenship, language, culture, and often the truth about how we came to be adopted. These are not simply unfortunate side effects. They are built into the legal architecture of plenary adoption itself. Even if every future adoption occurred without trafficking, fraud, or coercion we would still be left with a legal framework that permanently extinguishes many of our original rights in order to create and place us with another family.
International human rights law tells us that children have the right to identity, the right to preserve family relations, the right to nationality, the right to know and, wherever possible, be cared for by our first parents. Yet our current plenary adoption framework permanently severs many of these rights. That is why I believe the conversation is much bigger than trafficking. It is about whether the framework itself requires fundamental redesign.
Today many countries have and continue to investigate their adoption histories. This matters because acknowledging the truth matters, apologies matter, and so too does compensation. However, accountability is incomplete if we continue operating essentially the same system after these apologies.
Real accountability means ensuring we do not repeat the same mistakes.
It means asking not only What happened? but also Why did it happen? What features of this system allowed it to happen? What must change so future generations do not experience the same harm?
If investigations conclude that widespread human rights violations occurred yet governments continue using essentially the same legal framework, that is not accountability – that is documenting harm while preserving the conditions that created it. Accountability means learning, changing, building something better. I often get asked what could replace adoption? I don’t pretend to have all the answers but I believe we should be getting together everyone directly affected (adoptees, first families, adoptive families) with legal experts, child development and protection professionals, and governments and start to have these important conversations. When we gather them together we should be asking:
How do we uphold the rights of children and families while ensuring every child grows up safe, loved and connected?
Children can belong to more than one family
We already recognise complex family arrangements elsewhere. When parents separate or divorce, family courts don’t usually say a child must permanently lose one parent. Instead, we try to preserve the relationships. Children move between two households and nobody suggests children are incapable of loving both sets of parents. Children have two sets of extended families, sometimes even two cities or even countries. We accept this because we understand that children are capable of complex belonging.
So why does intercountry adoption still rely on an outdated assumption that a child can belong to only one family, one country, one culture, one legal identity? That model reflects an old nuclear family ideal, often centred on a single, closed, heterosexual family unit rather than the reality of children’s lives today. Children are far more capable than our laws allow.
We can belong to two families, love two mothers and fathers, have more than two sets of grandparents, carry two cultures, speak more than two languages, hold two citizenships.
The problem is not children’s capacity. The problem is a legal system that insists on simplicity by erasing complexity.
Perhaps the future looks more like guardianship than ownership, stewardship than substitution. Australia already recognises and practices these forms of care. Perhaps internationally we need entirely new models: cross-border guardianship, re-designed forms of Simple adoption. We need to discuss legal frameworks that preserve our original identity, birth certificate, nationality, dual citizenship, legal connection to both families, language, culture, truthful records, and ongoing relationships wherever safe and possible, not replacing one family with another but recognising that we can genuinely belong to both.
If we’re going to build something new, I suggest it begins with five simple principles.
- Preserve Identity. Never erase a child’s original identity.
- Preserve Family. Support families before separating them and preserve kinship wherever possible.
- Preserve Truth. No falsified records or sealed files. Truth belongs to the child.
- Preserve Belonging. Children should never have to lose one family, one culture or one country to gain another.
- Preserve Accountability. Design systems that prevent harm, investigate wrongdoing and evolve when evidence shows they violate human rights.
We need to be encouraging these conversations that talk about what to replace plenary adoption with and how to build a new system that honours the rights of both the adoptee, first family and second family.
In Closing
I’d like to finish where I began with the Chinese family who missed thirty years of birthdays, wondering where each other was, grieving indefinitely: a father who never stopped searching, a mother who kept her baby’s photographs for decades, a daughter who spent years looking for parents she had been led to believe she might never find. Eventually they found each other and yes, that reunion is beautiful and deserves to be celebrated. But I hope when our community sees reunions we are reminded to think more deeply and not only see joy of reunion but also the years that were stolen from them and the impact this has because that is the part of the story society at large too often chooses not to see.
If all we celebrate is the reunion without asking why it became necessary then we have learned very little from the almost 80 years of intercountry adoption. The question is no longer whether we can make intercountry adoption a little safer or finding a better way to separate children from families — it is whether we are brave enough to build something better. Not because vulnerable children don’t need families, there will always be some who absolutely do. But because families should not have to lose each other in order for children to be loved and cared for.
The future is about coming up with a better model to replace our plenary adoption system so that when separation cannot be avoided, we have legal frameworks that preserve identity, truth, family, culture, citizenship and belonging – not erase them.
Children should never have to lose one family to gain another.
No parent should spent thirty years searching for their child, no child should spend decades searching for the truth about who we are and society should not mistake reunion for justice.
Justice is ensuring that fewer families ever have to endure such separation again. When I think back to the Chinese family, I don’t just see reunion. I see thirty years of no investigation, no apology, and no compensation. If our response to reunions or investigations is simply to make adoption a little safer, then I believe we have missed the greatest lesson which is that we now have an opportunity to imagine something better.
Thank you.
Resources
Tackling illegal adoptions and addressing the rights of victims – Special Rapporteur, Ms. Maud de Boer-Buquicchio (2017)