Combating State Hostage Taking and Wrongful Detention

For over a decade, more governments have been detaining Americans for illegitimate reasons. These governments imprison U.S. nationals not because they have done anything wrong, but because they hold a U.S. passport—and the detaining governments want something from the United States in exchange for these Americans’ freedom. While the United States starts from a position of strength in addressing this issue, those holding U.S. citizens for leverage or advantage have sharpened their tool kit. The U.S. government must, in turn, sharpen its own. 

Existing Tools

While hostage taking is an ancient phenomenon, the U.S. government’s institutional response is relatively recent. When the U.S. government established most of its “hostage enterprise” in the mid-2010s, it was responding to the seizure of Americans by terrorist groups. Presidential Policy Directive 30 (PPD-30), issued in 2015, created a set of institutions intended to help win the freedom of Americans held hostage by groups or states. Five years later, the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act (22 U.S.C. 1741 et. seq.)—commonly known as “the Levinson Act”—codified many of PPD-30’s provisions and gave the U.S. government additional tools to resolve cases and sanction those responsible.

For the Department of State, one of its most important tools is the process of “determination” that a U.S. citizen or permanent resident is a “wrongful” detainee. The Levinson Act enumerates 11 criteria for the secretary of state to use in making such a determination, and it provides for such cases to be transferred from the purview of the Bureau of Consular Affairs to the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA) within the Department of State—a position the act codified into law.

The SPEHA office has given the issue of wrongful imprisonment a central address within the U.S. government. Successful envoys have established useful precedents: They have prioritized family outreach and helped families navigate both the U.S. government and foreign counterparts. They have also maintained the office’s nonpartisan stance and demonstrated a willingness to engage with odious parties. The SPEHA office—and its central role in the hostage enterprise—is important to preserve.

There is more the U.S. government can do using the tools it possesses. For example, using existing authorities, it should allocate more resources toward prosecuting the intelligence activities of foreign nationals from countries that wrongfully detain Americans. When such individuals are found surveilling U.S. government installations or otherwise gathering intelligence, U.S. law enforcement should treat these as serious national security incidents that may provide lawful leverage to secure the release of detained Americans.

Preserving existing litigation pathways for former hostages to seek compensation from their jailers is important, even though obtaining restitution and penalties is difficult. Current law provides for waivers of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) for designated state sponsors of terrorism in cases of hostage taking. It may also offer additional opportunities to access the assets of those wrongfully holding Americans—opportunities that are not currently fully utilized. The U.S. government should not obstruct such efforts and should assist in enforcing judgments whenever possible.

Where relevant, the Justice Department should also be open to using the International Prisoner Transfer Program (IPTP) more frequently to secure the release of Americans, and it should seek to broaden international participation in the program. The IPTP allows Americans convicted of crimes abroad to be transferred to U.S. custody to serve the remainder of their sentences. Upon release, the U.S. government can reduce the sentence or issue clemency. While this approach has drawbacks—including the individual incurring a criminal record—it can offer a quick and desirable resolution in some cases. A U.S. lawyer should thoroughly brief detainees on the implications before those detainees agree to such transfers. Consideration can also be given to expanding the “Declaration of Invalidity” clause, as provided for in Sec. 7708 of the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025, to annul international charges where possible.

New Tools

In recent years, some foreign governments have refined their practice of seizing U.S. citizens as leverage against the U.S. government. Congress should respond by creating tools to help the U.S. government fight back more effectively.

The premise of this activity should be that seizing Americans for leverage is a calculated behavior. To counter it, the U.S. government must aim to alter the perpetrators’ cost-benefit analysis. While the United States will sometimes need to negotiate for detainees’ release, it should strive to reduce the frequency of prisoner exchanges. Achieving that goal requires both deterring governments from taking Americans and discouraging U.S. nationals from traveling to high-risk countries. This dual approach would help prevent such incidents in the first place.

The first component—effective deterrence—requires a rigorous understanding of target countries’ cost-benefit calculations, threat perceptions, and assessments of U.S. commitment and intentions. That understanding will vary from country to country and over time. It demands genuine U.S. government prioritization of securing the freedom of its citizens. It also requires prioritizing targeted intelligence collection and intellectual empathy—both of which are often difficult to summon in dealing with countries that have complex, adversarial relationships with the United States.

Success deterring hostage taking and wrongful detention would have two indicators:

• Foreign governments and groups that take Americans or citizens of allied countries will do so less frequently, understanding that the benefits of such actions are diminishing rather than increasing—and that swift resolution is in their interest.
• Foreign governments and groups that do not currently engage in such practices will be deterred from starting.

To advance those goals:

Congress should require the Department of State to issue an annual report on hostage taking, wrongful detention, and arbitrary detention. The report should analyze how states approach the practice of depriving foreign nationals of their freedom for illegitimate purposes. Modeled on the Department of State’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, states should be ranked in tiers, with rankings reflecting the number of active cases, the seriousness of those cases, and habitual patterns of abusive behavior. Such behavior would include not only the imprisonment of foreign nationals for leverage, but also troubling practices such as encouraging hostage taking by non-state actors that the state sponsors, issuing exit bans, and denying U.S. consular access to prisoners. An important criterion for U.S. nationals is that the Department of State has notified the host government that the secretary of state has determined that an individual has been wrongfully or unlawfully detained, and the government continues that detention. The criteria should be clear, and, as with the Trafficking in Persons Report, it should encourage governments to strive to remain at the lowest level of concern. Actions that elevate a country’s rankings should be clear, and the consequences should be immediate and tangible.

The goal should not be to punish governments for what they have done, but to persuade them that the costs of doing more (or escalating) outweigh the benefits. The “worst of the worst” should be a very small category, one that carries genuine consequences.

The law should require the president to select from a list of punishments applied to countries in the higher tiers, with the goal of deterring countries from moving up the list by making the consequences known—and, simultaneously, clarifying which sanctions would be lifted if behavior improves.

Proposed mechanisms of deterrence include:

• International condemnation
• Department of State travel warnings or designations that U.S. travelers are at risk of kidnapping (K designation) or wrongful detention (D designation)
• Barring certain kinds of U.S. government aid
• Restricting financial transactions that touch U.S. dollars
• Targeted sanctions, asset freezes, and seizures, aligned with the processes, procedures, and products of the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (22 U.S.C. 108)
• Restricting government officials and their family members from travel to the United States
• Declaring some senior government officials persona non grata
• Sharply constraining the size of delegations to the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York
• Blocking family members of regime insiders from certain types of visas, including those allowing them to pursue higher education in the United States
• Restricting visas for students from perpetrating states
• Requiring special endorsements for U.S. passport use to offending countries
• Restricting remittance flows
• Sharply restricting the amount of U.S. currency travelers can carry into perpetrating states
• Targeting businesses that facilitate the direct or indirect travel of U.S. nationals to especially serious offenders, including raising U.S. landing fees for airlines that travel there if they allow U.S. passport holders to travel on those routes
• Voting against loans in international financial institutions
• Creating additional narrow exemptions to the FSIA to allow lawsuits to proceed in U.S. courts against foreign governments and officials for wrongful, unlawful, and arbitrary detention of U.S. nationals

All sanctions imposed as a consequence of this ranking should have recertification provisions, because sanctions with little prospect of removal are largely ineffective. The president may wish to grant SPEHA the authority to waive such sanctions or may seek an expeditious waiver on the recommendation of SPEHA to strengthen the envoy’s hand in negotiations with countries that wrongfully hold U.S. nationals.

Imposing real costs on countries that take U.S. citizens hostage may not compel them to release Americans immediately. However, if properly structured and communicated, the prospect of real (but reversible) costs can persuade countries to limit these activities and deter others from taking this route.

Terminology and Process

The United States has helpfully established 11 discrete criteria under the Levinson Act to help determine the improper detention of its citizens, and those criteria are emerging as a model that several allies and partners are seeking to emulate.

Two clarifications would be useful. The first is increased clarity around the determination process. Under current law, the secretary of state makes a wrongful detention determination, and the criteria “may include” the 11 cited in the act. Many families understandably wonder why their relatives are not termed as wrongfully detained when the detention meets several—or even a majority—of the Levinson Act criteria. In addition, it is not clear how many Americans have been determined as wrongfully detained, or why. A 2024 Foley Foundation report noted that 10 U.S. nationals had been wrongfully detained by Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Venezuela in the previous year, but the U.S. government had so designated only half of them. While national security concerns may play a role in a very small number of cases, the U.S. government should promote greater transparency and clarity in its determination process. 

The second issue is terminology. The United States is the only country to use the term “wrongful detention.” The initial decision to use this phrasing was a bureaucratic compromise with the Justice Department, which sought to preserve the FBI’s central role countering hostage taking by non-state actors. The Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell is based at the FBI, and its emphasis is on recovering U.S. nationals and prosecuting those who hold them.

Much of the world has adopted its own compromise, combining the universal human right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned with the act of illegitimate imprisonment under the term “arbitrary detention.” In the phenomenon that is the focus of this commission’s work, however, the detention is purposive, not arbitrary. While victims may be chosen almost at random, their citizenship is the determining factor. Offending governments design these detentions to extract things of value from other governments.

It is increasingly apparent that states are refining their practice of “hostage diplomacy,” seizing individuals for many of the same reasons that terrorists and criminals do: to use the resulting leverage to extract something of value from those who care about the individuals being held.

This space is ripe for increased international cooperation, as demonstrated by the Canadian government’s success in building a coalition of 80 signatories (including the United States) to its “Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations.” This effort seeks both to distinguish state efforts to hold foreign nationals for diplomatic leverage from flawed legal processes and to unite states in combating this practice. Greater cooperation in this area would help establish common definitions and criteria, create standing coalitions for action, and give teeth to efforts to ostracize countries that inappropriately detain foreign nationals. The United States is a signatory, as are many of its allies. Supporting this effort is worthwhile—not least because, rather than constraining the United States, it would provide it with more tools.

The most powerful benefit is the option of using the word “hostage” to describe situations in which states improperly hold Americans for leverage. Currently, the U.S. government uses the term “hostage” only for individuals held by non-state actors (although, paradoxically, the word “hostage” appears in the title of the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, who leads much of this work).

Giving the U.S. government an explicit opportunity to declare someone a hostage provides leverage in several ways. First, many countries bristle at the notion that they are holding people hostage, and the threat of being labeled as hostage takers carries reputational risks. Even more importantly, hostage taking is a clear and serious crime under both U.S. and international law. For example, 18 U.S. Code § 1203 explicitly criminalizes hostage taking and was intended to implement the U.S. accession to the International Convention against the Taking of Hostages. U.S. law also provides for the suspension of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in cases of hostage taking by states designated as state sponsors of terrorism—and Congress may wish to consider carefully expanding that provision. Both U.S. and international law provide exceptions to sovereign immunity for clear crimes such as torture and genocide, and international law likewise recognizes hostage taking as a crime of similar gravity.

While it would not be prudent for U.S. officials—or U.S. law—to erode sovereign immunity protections recklessly, having the option to challenge such immunity in cases of egregious abuse is appropriate. Giving U.S. government negotiators the ability to escalate a case from arbitrary detention to hostage taking creates a clear and credible threat, with potentially serious consequences. In addition, clearly invoking a state hostage-taking designation can galvanize greater support from like-minded allies, for whom explicit hostage taking is a serious crime in their own legal systems as well.

International Cooperation

Shifting U.S. terminology and helping coordinate shared definitions of state hostage taking, wrongful detention, and arbitrary detention with partners and allies would make it easier to pursue international cooperation on freeing foreign citizens who are improperly detained overseas. To this end, the United States should seek to assemble a coalition of close and like-minded partners with whom it could work especially closely on hostage-related issues. The “Joint Statement on Unjust Detention,” issued by representatives of the United States, Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom in Big Sky, Montana, in March 2025, is a helpful start.

In principle, an ongoing working group that combines the Group of Seven countries with the “Five Eyes” countries would be helpful. At a minimum, the United States should work with these countries to establish a designated hostage envoy, analogous to SPEHA, to serve as a focal point for government information collection and multilateral action on cases of arbitrary detention and hostage taking. These envoys should collaborate on individual cases, broader policy coordination, and adoption of domestic legislation analogous to the Levinson Act. Other forms of enhanced cooperation could include intelligence sharing, exerting collective diplomatic and consular leverage, supporting mutual resolution strategies, amplifying the effects of sanctions, and assisting one another with hostage and wrongful detainee recovery.

A broader effort to enlist Group of Twenty (G20) countries is worth considering, but the presence of China and Russia in the G20 is likely either to obstruct progress or to be counterproductive. Continuing to support the expansion of the Canadian initiative on arbitrary detention in state-to-state relations—both in terms of signatories and effectiveness—would certainly be appropriate.

U.S. Government Organization

 The detention of U.S. nationals overseas—whether by states or their agents, or by non-state actors—is a complex phenomenon that requires cooperation across the U.S. government. The Justice Department normally takes the lead on hostage taking by non-state actors, with an eye toward eventual prosecution in U.S. courts. The Department of State takes the lead on consular issues, ensuring that U.S. citizens’ rights are respected when they are reasonably accused of violating the law overseas. When states imprison U.S. citizens in order to coerce U.S. government concessions, responsibilities are less clearly defined.

As argued above, a principal area of focus for the U.S. government should be deterring state-sponsored hostage taking. To be effective, deterrence requires a whole-of-government strategy that employs all the tools of national power. Deterring countries from wrongfully imprisoning Americans—as well as from carrying out other objectionable behaviors—requires leverage in interagency negotiations that only the White House possesses. It is a task that must be properly coordinated by the National Security Council (NSC) and supported by the Department of State, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the intelligence community, and others.

The SPEHA office at the Department of State should focus on advocating for hostages and their families. Within a U.S. government system that balances competing priorities, SPEHA should serve as a persistent and dogged advocate for prioritizing and securing the freedom of Americans who have been unjustly imprisoned, while supporting their families throughout the process. The envoy should also seek to understand the demands of those improperly holding U.S. citizens and negotiate directly for their release. While other hostage-related activities—such as deterring potential hostage takers—remain vital U.S. government priorities, the SPEHA office is not well positioned to work across the Department of State, let alone the broader U.S. government, to advance that goal.

SPEHA benefits significantly from being part of the Department of State and should remain centered there. The Levinson Act prescribes that SPEHA lead diplomatic engagement on U.S. hostage policy and coordinate such efforts with other parts of the U.S. government. Still, the United States should seek to institutionalize more effective coordination between SPEHA and the White House. The Levinson Act provides for the establishment of the Hostage Recovery Group and the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, and in practice, the NSC senior director for counterterrorism has led these efforts. That individual’s responsibilities should also explicitly include shaping U.S. policy toward instances of arbitrary detention and state-sponsored hostage taking, with the understanding that implementation and day-to-day management of hostage policy must reside outside the White House.
 

Outreach to U.S. Citizens

While the blame for arbitrary detention and hostage taking falls squarely on the governments that engage in the practice, U.S. travelers must act responsibly. Some U.S. citizens engage in reckless behavior—either because they do not understand the risks of traveling to dangerous places or because they decide to ignore those risks in pursuit of excitement, novelty, concern for a loved one, or some other motivation. Hostage taking is almost always a low-probability, high-impact event, but it is life-changing for those who endure it.

The U.S. government should expand its outreach efforts to discourage Americans from traveling to high-risk locations. Tactics could include:

• Financial disincentives, such as imposing a tax or surcharge on dangerous travel or requiring insurance for such travel
• Restricting Americans from carrying cash into countries with patterns of arbitrary detention and hostage taking
• Stepping up efforts to ensure U.S. nationals do not use cryptocurrencies for financial transactions in states under sanction
• Building on the provisions of PL 118-159, which includes the option of completing a Privacy Act waiver when being issued a passport. The U.S. government should strongly encourage travelers to complete Privacy Act waivers when traveling to countries of concern or when enrolling in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP). A pop-up or requirement to consider completing a Privacy Act waiver is an opportunity for the U.S. government to make clear the potential consequences of travel, forces the traveler to consider those consequences, and can facilitate government engagement with family and advocates if a traveler is detained. In general, a more streamlined version of the Privacy Act—or a more streamlined waiver process in the case of arbitrary detention and hostage taking—would facilitate work on this issue.
• Mandating that higher education institutions and private companies counsel employees and students on the risks of travel to states of concern, and combining that counseling with the requirement to acknowledge the risk and complete a Privacy Act waiver under relevant conditions
• Requiring special passport validations for travel to offending countries
• Building pop-ups into travel websites that warn Americans of the dangers of travel to countries of concern
• Launching a public awareness campaign that includes former hostages, if such a campaign is demonstrated to be effective

Family and Returned Hostage Support

For many Americans who have been held hostage or arbitrarily detained, the ordeal does not end with their release. Returning Americans often need help with an array of services, including, but not limited to, issues such as back taxes and penalties for periods of captivity; reestablishing a credit history; updating identity documents; and connecting to psychosocial support, rehabilitation, and health care. Some require even more basic assistance, such as clothing and temporary housing. Although nongovernmental organizations play a vital role in supporting former hostages, they often lack the resources or authority to assist with legal, financial, and bureaucratic processes. Recognizing this, the U.S. government should formalize access to care by designating a caseworker to assist each returned hostage. It should also consider creating a Returnee Support Guide based on evidence from returnees over the last decade.

The U.S. government should also establish a process to systematically debrief former hostages to better understand the conditions of captivity and the individuals and institutions involved in detaining Americans. The goal should be both to help protect U.S. citizens and to lay the groundwork for punishing perpetrators. Because of SPEHA’s direct engagement with hostages and their families, SPEHA could reasonably take on this activity, in cooperation with the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell where appropriate.

Jon B. Alterman holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Jason Rezaian is the director of press freedom initiatives at the Washington Post. He served as the Post’s correspondent in Tehran from 2012 to 2016, and spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his release in January 2016. He is a non-resident senior associate with the CSIS Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy.

This report is made possible in part by the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.