The United States remains committed to bringing all American hostages and wrongful detainees home.
At the recent inaugural U.S. Hostage and Wrongful Detainee Day, Secretary of State Antony Blinken recounted how he carries a list with the name of every American who is held hostage or unjustly detained. “Over the past three years,” he noted, “I’ve been able to cross 46 names off that list.”
And yet, “dozens of our fellow citizens are held without cause by foreign governments, terrorist groups, and other non-state actors – without their rights and apart from their families,” said Secretary Blinken:
“Families who, month by month, minute by minute, endure the agony of not knowing where their loved one is being held whether they are suffering or when they will see them again. To those families ... know this: We will keep fighting for your family members as if they were our own. We will not give up – ever.”
The U.S. will keep expanding and strengthening the tools it has to get hostages back, including the Hostage Recovery Group, which brings together the State Department, the White House, the intelligence community, and other parts of the government to coordinate efforts to free unjustly detained Americans and provide support for their families. And like the 2020 Robert Levinson Act, it empowers the U.S. to impose additional financial penalties and travel restrictions on the hostage takers.
“We’ve teamed up with Canada to lead a group of more than 70 countries who have endorsed a declaration against arbitrary detention by states, and who strive to stand together against any government that uses foreign nationals as bargaining chips,” explained Secretary Blinken:
“The more countries who join us in applying pressure, the more we raise the cost on perpetrators, and the more we force them to think twice before detaining additional innocent people. And that’s crucial to ensuring no one else has to live through this nightmare.”
“Every day that we fight for the release of unjustly detained Americans – whether that ‘we’ is our government, a community, a family, or an individual – we show who we are,” said Secretary Blinken, “and what we value most. Our freedom. Our humanity. And our readiness to bring to bear the strength of an entire nation to defend the rights of a single citizen.”
