A toxic deal or pragmatic exchange? Protection for foreign nationals who help free an Australian hostage |
A toxic deal or pragmatic exchange? Protection for foreign nationals who help free an Australian hostage
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When Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was released from one of Iran’s most notorious prisons, 5½ years ago, Australia celebrated.
After falsely being accused of espionage, she’d spent 804 days in prison – a year, cumulatively, in solitary confinement – an experience so psychologically torturous that on one occasion she found herself beating her skull against the wall, dozens of times. “I don’t know how it happened,” she later wrote in her memoir, The Uncaged Sky.
And finally, she was free.
But now, she has a message for the federal government. So-called “hostage diplomacy”, of which she was a victim, is on the rise. This is the result, she says, of the disintegration of the international rules-based order. With that disintegration, countries like Iran, Venezuela and China have become emboldened to “act with impunity and do whatever they like”. Which, in some instances, means kidnapping someone in exchange for something the country wants, like a ransom, or the release of its own political prisoners.
And in order to combat hostage diplomacy, the Australian government needs to begin considering out-of-the-box ideas, says Moore-Gilbert, a research fellow in security studies at Macquarie University who was arrested at........