The exclusive – but growing – group no one wants to be part of

It’s taken me years to realise this, but prison has radically rewired my emotional landscape.

In the 804 days I lost to Iran’s Evin prison, I spent a lot of time oscillating between being extremely anxious and furiously angry. The anxiousness faded with time into dull numbness and resignation. The anger boiled, then simmered, then reduced to a cool flame deep inside my gut. There it sits still, three years after my release.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is the author of the 2022 memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.

Unlike my pre-prison self, on the outside I am calm and unflappable. I don’t shout and I don’t yell. Serenity reigns above, but the flame still burns below. Only now do I recognise that the prison anger is still there, because my relationship with anger has changed so dramatically. Traffic might have irked me in the past; likewise, overblown male egos and people who are chronically late.

Now, my rage is trained on a much more sophisticated target. The Islamic Republic of Iran. The Revolutionary Guards Corps. The hostage-diplomacy business model, and all those who have made innocent people like me suffer because of it.

There are trigger points. The killing of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 – and the unprecedented nationwide protests that erupted across Iran as a result – was an obvious one. During the unrest, Evin prison was set on fire, with some of my former cellmates trapped inside. For many days, we didn’t know who would make it out alive (all female prisoners did, but eight male inmates died).

Being angry is generally not a great look for someone wanting to be taken seriously in a professional space. My outward calmness has helped me in this regard; yet at times, I have tripped myself up in my quest for justice in the years following my release. Sometimes I have directed my cold rage at the wrong targets. Other times, I have been too uncompromising and have alienated potential allies.

One of the unexpected joys I discovered after prison was that I am now a member of an eclectic, and sadly, ever-growing, group of former hostages and wrongful detainees scattered throughout the world. It was through generous conversations with big-hearted people like Jason Rezaian, Anoosheh Ashoori, Xiyue Wang, Sam Goodwin, Matt Hedges, Jolie King, Mark Firkin, and others that I found healing. They get it when so few others truly can.

Most of us still have that anger boiling inside, although it expresses itself in diverse ways. All of us agree that achieving some sense of justice and accountability is crucial to being able to move on from our experiences in prison. All of us want to prevent what was done to us from happening to others.

It is with this in mind that the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance (AWADA) was born. AWADA seeks to build a coalition of Australian victims of wrongful detention alongside a network of pro bono advisers and expert practitioners to help the families of current Australian detainees and to push for meaningful reforms that might deliver justice to victims.

In this task, I am joined by fellow Australian former detainees and my good friends Professor Sean Turnell and Cheng Lei, along with a number of generous others with direct experience or professional expertise in wrongful detention. We want to offer an Australia-based community to anyone who might be going through what we did, or be grappling with recovery from it.

By most accounts, wrongful detention and hostage diplomacy are on the rise worldwide, as malign actors including Iran, Russia and China continue to erode the international rules-based order.

Iran, for example, has revelled in its ability to use hostage diplomacy to compel adversaries such as the US and the UK to transfer billions of dollars in frozen oil revenue and historical military debts, often in violation of these countries’ own sanctions regimes. Iran also routinely uses hostages to force high-stakes prisoner swaps, such as my own exchange for three convicted terrorists.

Russia used its 2022 arrest of American basketball star Brittney Griner to secure the release of the “merchant of death”, a notorious Russian arms dealer called Viktor Bout with an incalculable amount of blood on his hands. And in addition to targeting Australian Cheng Lei, China successfully leveraged the 2018 detention of two Canadian citizens to compel the return of high-profile Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.

The Western response to this challenge must necessarily be reactive, and as such it is a fantasy to suppose that the state hostage-taking trend might be seen off in its entirety. As long as dodgy authoritarian regimes stand to benefit from the practice, innocent people like myself will continue to be imprisoned and exchanged for diplomatic concessions.

What we can do, however, is ensure that there is a price to be paid each time an Australian is thrown in prison to be used as a bargaining chip.

The Canadian parliament is considering a Foreign Hostage-Takers Accountability Act, similar to the United States’ Levinson Act that passed into law in 2020.

Both allow for travel bans and asset freezes on foreign nationals complicit in the wrongful detention of their citizens and allocate much-needed consular resources to assisting current victims and their families. The Levinson Act goes further, waiving nation-state immunity by permitting US nationals to sue hostage-taking states in American courts.

Australia should consider passing similar legislation, perhaps modelled on the Canadian act. We could also potentially use our autonomous sanctions regime (“Magnitsky” sanctions) to punish individuals who are known repeat perpetrators of the wrongful detention of Australians, which is a grave violation of international law. We should also increase funding to the Department of Foreign Affairs’ consular operations to ensure they can continue to provide the exemplary support that I received to all Australian victims.

The cold flame of anger still burns inside me to this day. Maybe it will never be extinguished – and maybe that is not necessarily a bad thing. With this new alliance, I am able to channel that anger in a productive direction and try to focus it on helping others, rather than feeding it with bitterness or tempting it with the urge for revenge or recrimination. Maybe we will fail in our task, but in striving, there is healing.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an academic in Middle Eastern political science and the author of the 2022 memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.

The Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance will be formally launched on Wednesday at a public event hosted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra.

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