What happens if authoritarian states start executing hostages?

What happens if authoritarian states start executing hostages?

Washington Post- May 10th 2022

A court in Sweden is preparing to issue a verdict in the war crimes trial of Hamid Nouri, a former Iranian official who is implicated in the mass execution of dissidents. Seemingly in response, Iran’s judiciary announced last week that it intended to carry out the execution of a Swedish citizen sentenced to death on unfounded charges.

This moment could mark either a horrific escalation in the Iranian regime’s hostage diplomacy strategy — one that puts the life of any innocent foreign national that travels to Iran at grave risk. Or it could provide the clarity that the free world needs to finally come together to disrupt the serial crime of state hostage-taking.

For years, the biggest distinction between hostages abducted by non-state actors versus those arrested and held via a government’s judicial system was the hostages’ probable fates. Those taken by terrorists were more likely to be killed by their captors, while those held by states were more likely to be released in negotiated settlements.

ut those calculations could change dramatically if the Islamic Republic follows through on threats to execute Ahmad Reza Djalali, who has been imprisoned in Iran since 2016.

Djalali, a doctor who specializes in disaster medicine and a naturalized Swedish citizen, was arrested while visiting family in Iran. He has been subjected to long periods of solitary confinement and said he was compelled under torture to make false confessions to crimes in which there is no evidence he committed.

Djalali says he is being punished for refusing demands from Iranian intelligence officers to spy on European contacts, a tactic they have used with other academics.

Ultimately, he was put through a show trial overseen by Abolghassem Salavati, known as the “judge of death” for his prolific use of capital punishment. Salavati was also the judge in my trial.

In Sweden, meanwhile, jurors are deliberating the fate of Nouri, an Iranian citizen who was arrested on war-crimes charges for his alleged role in the systematic massacre of thousands of domestic dissidents. In 1988, an untold number of Iranians who opposed the Islamic Republic were arrested and many were hanged.

Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s current president, was a deputy prosecutor at the time and part of what has become known as the “death commission,” a group mostly made up of clerics who ordered the extrajudicial executions. Nouri was a prison official who allegedly led many of the dissidents to the “corridor of death” that was the last stop before the commission.