Uzra Zeya’s Remarks at the Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Arbitrary Detention and Hostage Diplomacy: “Deterrence: action to tackle the scourge of hostage taking”

As prepared for delivery at the Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Arbitrary Detention and Hostage Diplomacy “Deterrence: action to tackle the scourge of hostage taking” on Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Thanks very much to the organizers for inviting me to participate in this discussion.

We at Human Rights First have worked for the release of human rights defenders and other political prisoners for several decades. We became more involved in the growing framework of policies and practices on hostage diplomacy more recently, when our colleague and courageous pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested in Moscow in April 2022, after denouncing Putin’s brutality against Ukraine and the Russian people.

Our work growing a global coalition of over 300 civil society groups focused on targeted human rights sanctions like the Global Magnitsky program proved quite relevant. The United States has flexible authorities for imposing financial sanctions and visa bans in response to this kind of arbitrary detention, whether it’s treated as a human rights abuse or as an act of hostage-taking.

After Vladimir’s arrest, we worked with Bill’s team and Vladimir’s wife Evgenia and many other NGOs to recommend the U.S. government sanction several Russian officials involved in Vladimir’s arbitrary detention. In the following months, at least five Magnitsky jurisdictions imposed sanctions in connection with his case.

Evgenia’s long campaign for Vladimir’s release was successful in the end. We think that the calls for sanctions helped get governments focused on his case, and that in turn, imposing the sanctions helped keep them invested in his fate and helped ensure that he and other dissidents were included in the famous August 2024 prisoner swap.

Obviously, what works in getting a prisoner released depends on the context, and not every political prisoner is going to be able to count on this degree of support.

But to help inform the efforts under way here in the UK to develop policies and institutions on hostage diplomacy, I am happy to suggest five lessons from our own experiences and observations.

Some are relevant to the challenge of preventing this kind of wrongful detention in the first place – because foreign autocrats shouldn’t be able to empty our jails of real criminals by taking journalists or dissidents hostage and demanding to make trades.

First, governments need to show solidarity with each other. In Vladimir’s case, it was powerful that so many of the Magnitsky jurisdictions weighed in to sanction his persecutors, not just the United Kingdom where he is a citizen. Indeed, Canada’s moving first may have helped spur other governments with closer ties to Vladimir to act.

As much as possible, that should be standard practice – with governments building the expectation in the minds of perpetrators that the backlash against them will be automatic and will be multilateral.

Second, governments should sometimes keep targeted sanctions in place even after a prisoner is released, because so often the perpetrators are repeat offenders.

It’s true that sanctions are meant to spur behavior change, and that offering to lift sanctions may sometimes help secure that change.

But when Vladimir was released, for example, it wasn’t because the Moscow judges and prosecutors who were sanctioned for jailing him had changed their behavior. That was decided far above their level – and they remain at their posts, ready to keep staffing Putin’s machinery of arbitrary detention.

We argued that keeping the stigma of Magnitsky sanctions on those officials would be a useful reminder – and a helpful fact to seed from the start in the media coverage – when other political prisoners are inevitably brought before those same judges and prosecutors for sham trials.

Third, when a country’s record of arbitrary detentions calls for it, governments should use stronger policy tools.

As one example, the Biden administration in 2022 added a “Wrongful Detention” indicator to the State Department’s existing set of travel warnings – like “Terrorism” and “Crime” – for tourists and other travelers seeking travel advice. The “Wrongful Detention” marker currently applies to eight countries, including Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. I would note that China is conspicuously absent from this list, the result of a November 2024 deal in which Beijing released several detainees.

But it’s not just U.S. adversaries who wrongfully imprison U.S. nationals. If the governments of Egypt or Rwanda, for example, believed that imprisoning Mohamed Soltan or Paul Rusesabagina would have prompted the U.S. government to apply this label to them, they might have thought twice about doing it, given the costs to their reputation among potential travelers.

More recently, President Trump directed the creation of a list of “State Sponsors of Wrongful Detention” that would serve a similar purpose. The parallel to the well-known “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list will pack a strong stigma – though that suggests it’s unlikely to be used against any but the U.S. government’s worst adversaries.

Fourth, governments should make clear that they will take arbitrary detention seriously regardless of whom the perpetrators target.

In the United States, the legal framework on hostage diplomacy makes clear that legal permanent residents like Vladimir – sometimes called green-card holders – are no less eligible to have the State Department’s special envoy for hostage affairs take up their case than U.S. citizens, if they have “significant ties” to the country. That’s an approach worth replicating.

U.S. practice has been less clear when it’s an activist or a dissident who is imprisoned.

No doubt, it’s uniquely unfair when someone is imprisoned who’s just a tourist, or just visiting a family member, and has no hope of release without a deal because that’s what their captors want.

But it’s unfortunate that the U.S. has sometimes appeared to differentiate between those people who are wrongly arrested as punishment for speaking out, and those whose wrongful detention was for leverage in a trade.

Vladimir never received the “wrongfully detained” finding that can set in motion the U.S. government’s hostage-affairs diplomacy – nor have others with strong U.S. ties, like the dual national Theary Seng who is serving a six-year prison sentence in Cambodia for social-media posts criticizing the government.

Governments should make clear that they will stand with families, impose consequences on perpetrators, and offer support to released prisoners when they come home – whether the motive for their jailing was transactional or simply repressive, or anything in between.

Finally, if governments want their sanctions tools to have an impact in emergencies, they need to use them credibly.

Some of the power of sanctions comes from their financial impact, but much of it comes from the stigma of being called a human rights abuser or a hostage-taker by a credible source.

The Trump administration has been misusing its sanctions tools – not in every instance, but in several crucial ones that have begun to dilute the shaming power of being put on the U.S. sanctions list, and even the Global Magnitsky list. Using these tools to target political enemies or defend political friends is wrong and will make them weaker for essential purposes.

Thanks again for the invitation to speak and exchange ideas on this incredibly important topic.

I think all of us understand how prisoner swaps like the August 2024 deal have saved lives, reunited families, and restored hope. In the aggregate, though, we have to make this kind of hostage taking less rewarding and more costly to the perpetrators, so that fewer lives are endangered like this in the first place. Thank you.