WASHINGTON, D.C. - Rep. French Hill (R-AR) and Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), Co-Chairs of the Hostage Task Force in the House, led a letter together to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging the State Department to develop additional tools to disincentivize wrongful detention, hostage taking, and discourage Americans from traveling to hostile nations.
In their letter, Rep. Hill and Rep. Stevens summarize four policy suggestions, which include forming joint penalties with allies against states that take hostages, developing a formal determination and designation of hostage-taking nations, using existing authority to restrict travel by U.S. citizens to nations that routinely take Americans, and strongly encouraging travelers to countries with a Level 4 Travel Warning to register with their local embassy and work with TSA to develop informational materials at airports.
To read the lawmakers’ full letter, please visit HERE:
Dear Secretary Blinken, We write to commend your work in helping to accomplish the largest prisoner exchange with Russia since the Cold War and bringing home Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and fourteen other Americans, Russians and Europeans imprisoned in Russia to their families. This deal underscores that too many of our fellow Americans are increasingly being wrongfully detained and held hostage by hostile governments and terror groups which treat our citizens as disposable geopolitical bargaining chips.
We recognize and applaud the important and difficult advances made across the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations through the issuance of PPD-30 in 2015 and the passage of the Robert Levinson Hostage Recover and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act in 2020. The success of a multinational approach with Russia in this particular instance should be formalized more broadly to disincentivize wrongful detention and hostage taking. We were pleased to see the initial progress made with the signing of the 2021 Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-toState Relations to disincentivize wrongful detention and hostage taking. Sharing of data and best practices amongst like-minded nations is an important first step.
Even so, the United States Government must do more. The taking of Americans as hostages continues despite significant action taken by the last three administrations to prevent this. In addition, we fear an increasing number of Americans will be taken abroad in future years unless the State Department develops additional tools to disincentivize these practices and more effectively discourages Americans from placing themselves in harms way in the first place.
We must build on our progress to disincentivize wrongful detention and hostage taking. As such, we urge you to:
1. Promote and coordinate ways to impose joint penalties with our allies and partners against states and individuals involved in hostage taking and wrongful detention, with the goal of concluding a declaration to urge multilateral sanctions against those credibly shown to have wrongfully detained a person.
2. Develop a formal rubric to determine and designate states as Hostage-Taking Nations. The United States should impose countermeasures against those states’ officials and diplomats (and their immediate family members), including restricting the travel radius for any officials visiting the United States on diplomatic visas. These restrictions could be tightened or loosened as Americans are either wrongfully detained or released from the custody of such nations, creating a carrot along with a stick.
3. Utilize the Secretary of State’s existing authority to restrict travel of U.S. citizens in the event of severe risks to their health and safety, recognizing that the existing waiver process provides for flexibility in this process. We are concerned by the growing number of Americans who require the assistance of the U.S. government to be evacuated or released from detention in countries already on the State Department’s Level 4 Travel Warning list. Unfortunately, many U.S. travelers either ignore these warnings or perhaps do not see them in the first place. We applaud the Department’s continued use of this authority since 2018 to restrict U.S. travel to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea after the horrific detention and abuse of Otto Warmbier which resulted in his death. Such an added burden to travel would help discourage our citizens from taking unnecessary risks traveling to other known dangerous countries.
4. Strongly discourage American travelers whose final destination is a country with a Level 4 Travel Warning from traveling during their flight booking process and strongly encourage such travelers to register with the local embassy. Specifically, the State Department should consider partnering with the Transportation Security Administration to develop a system that could include elements such as posters in airports or informational briefings and acknowledgements of risks. The Department should also collect, analyze, and learn from U.S. visa data to better develop strategies to discourage Americans from traveling to the countries we warn them against visiting. This data should inform us whether our efforts to prevent such travel are succeeding or failing.
We cannot only be reactive to the growing plight of Americans taken abroad - the United States must take strong and decisive action now to prevent this stream of wrongful detentions and hostage-takings from turning into a flood. We stand ready to work with you to implement any of these initiatives.
We request a briefing on the Department’s plans to address these recommendations by 45 days from October 2, 2024.
