Martin Ryan in Azerbaijan, Laurent Vinatier in Russia, Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris in Iran, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in China… This list of Westerners arrested on spurious pretexts in authoritarian countries, held for lengthy periods and eventually released in exchange for various concessions, is far from exhaustive. While French journalist Christophe Gleizes remains imprisoned in Algeria for “apologia for terrorism,” against a backdrop of tensions between Algiers and Paris, the author of this article puts forward a number of ways in which democracies could better resist such blackmail.

For several decades now, the arrest and subsequent negotiated release of Western nationals on fanciful charges, following sham judicial proceedings and “magnanimous” pardons, has been part of the repertoire of a number of authoritarian states. The phenomenon, known since the late 1960s, accelerated from the 2010s onwards. Through its frequency, “hostage diplomacy” has become a fully fledged dimension of international relations, forcing governments to renounce their principles in order to save citizens for whom they are responsible. On one side, an undemocratic state arrests a foreign national and uses him or her as leverage in pursuit of strategic objectives; on the other, a democratic state works behind the scenes, through concessions and ransoms negotiated in the shadows, to bring that person home.

Faced with a “rogue state,” one must therefore negotiate—and negotiating means giving way, since whatever one agrees to give, however little, will have been extorted. It is important to take the measure of this phenomenon, which is beginning to attract the attention of researchers (1). Why are democracies becoming the almost institutional victims of these practices? And what means do they have at their disposal to deal with them?

Big Players and Small Players

The Hostage, from Political Guarantee to Diplomatic Leverage

Alongside alliances, peace treaties and oaths of allegiance, hostage-taking has been part of international-relations practice since the earliest antiquity. For centuries, the hostage represented a legitimate political guarantee. The Roman and Chinese empires did not hesitate to keep the sons of tributary princes at their courts as a pledge of loyalty and a vehicle for civilisation.

Modern international law and the codification of state norms gradually shifted hostage-taking into illegality; with the Geneva Conventions defining hostage-taking as a war crime, yesterday’s diplomatic act became a criminal one (2).

This legal downgrading has reshaped the phenomenon: certain authoritarian regimes have resorted to a new “hostage diplomacy” that defies the international order under the cover of domestic legality. Indeed, no international body can have jurisdiction before domestic remedies have been exhausted before domestic courts—most often sham courts—serving the foreign policy of the hostage-taking state (3).

China, Iran, Russia: Experts in the Field

Although China has a broad range of coercive instruments—trade restrictions, investment boycotts, pressure on investments, exit bans, and so on—the arbitrary detention of foreign nationals is often, for the People’s Republic, one of the most effective means. As early as 1967, in response to the arrest in Hong Kong of one of its subversion agents, it detained the Reuters correspondent in Beijing (4), inaugurating a logic of reciprocity that has affected Washington’s closest allies—Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom—in order to undermine the credibility of the United States in Asia (5). The so-called “two Michaels” case is the most recent illustration: in 2018, the arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, as part of a US extradition request, triggered within days the detention in China of two Canadian nationals, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, officially …