During my first encounter with Ali Qena’atkar, the deputy prosecutor in Evin Prison, he looked at me and said: “Let me make this clear. From an infant to a 99-year-old woman, we have no mercy.” At the time, I understood the threat as something directed mainly toward prisoners. It took some time to understand that wrongful detention rarely ends with the detainee. Its consequences travel outward into spouses, children, parents, and friends, leaving what I have come to think of as shrapnel, invisible injuries carried by those standing outside the prison walls.
During prison phone calls, I often heard strength in my wife’s voice while knowing how exhausted she and the children must have been. Wrongful detention creates a strange emotional balance in which families and detainees try to protect one another from fears neither can remove. Families of detainees live in a permanent state of uncertainty, balancing hope with despair, public advocacy with private exhaustion, and resilience with fear. The prison walls may confine one person, but the psychological reach of captivity extends far beyond the cell.
Many people assume that release marks the end of the ordeal. In reality, freedom is often the beginning of a different and more complicated process. Former detainees must rebuild routines, relationships, confidence, and identity, while families attempt to recover from years of suspended life. Some injuries heal quickly. Others remain embedded beneath the surface long after the headlines disappear. The shrapnel does not simply vanish when the prisoner returns home.
Governments confronting wrongful detention face difficult and imperfect choices. Much of the diplomacy involved takes place invisibly, away from public scrutiny, and families are often left navigating long periods of uncertainty with extraordinarily little clarity. Securing the release of detainees is, of course, essential, but release alone should not be seen as the end of responsibility. Wrongful detention leaves long shadows, and responding to it requires not only diplomatic effort but also long-term understanding of its human consequences.
Authoritarian systems fear dignity, memory, testimony, solidarity, and truth because these survive long after prison walls lose their power. Democracies therefore face a difficult challenge: protecting their citizens without normalising hostage taking, confronting authoritarian coercion collectively, and ensuring that human dignity never becomes secondary to political transaction. The next hostage is already waiting. The question is whether democracies will respond differently when that moment comes.
By: Anoosheh Ashoori – Former hostage in Iran and Advocate for Families Affected by Wrongful Detention
