UK – Telegraph, Apr. 08, 2026
A ceasefire deal may not bring relief to the hostages cruelly kept by Tehran’s regime
Spare a thought for the foreign detainees locked inside Iran’s prison system. Among them are travellers, academics and dual nationals who entered the country to attend conferences, visit family or for business, and instead found themselves accused of espionage and imprisoned in places such as Tehran’s notoriously cruel Evin prison.
During the last round of hostilities between Israel and Iran in June 2025, Evin itself was struck in an Israeli air attack that killed at least 80 people and damaged large parts of the prison complex.
For prisoners already living in extreme isolation, the ceasefire deal is only a pause to their terror. Only weeks ago, British travellers Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who were arrested while on a round-the-world motorbike journey, were sentenced by a Revolutionary Court to 10 years’ imprisonment on espionage charges they deny.
Their case follows a long line of British and other foreigners wrongfully and intentionally detained in Iran. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori were each arrested while visiting family, and held arbitrarily for six years and 4.7 years respectively. Professor Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian academic, was attending a conference and reported being mistreated. Or American Siamak Namazi exchanged in a $6bn (£4.5bn) deal over frozen oil payments, but not before he had spent a gruelling eight years in prison that he says altered his life irrevocably.
They were all detained by a state that has refined what is now widely known as “hostage diplomacy”: the deliberate arrest of foreign nationals under sweeping national-security charges in order to gain political, financial or military leverage.
Hostage-taking is a crime prohibited by the 1979 International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, a treaty endorsed by three-quarters of the world’s countries, including Iran, and is also a war crime proscribed by the Geneva Conventions.
Other countries engage in these tactics. But Iran is the undisputed leader of this illegal practice.
