About Hostagesses Alliance

‘The International Hostagesses Alliance to Eliminate State-Sponsored Violence, Kidnapping, and Hostage-Taking of Women and Girls’, publicly known as the ‘Hostagesses Alliance’, is an independent, global and nongovernmental coalition committed to ending acts of state-sponsored violence against women and girls worldwide.

The Hostagesses Alliance was founded through the collaborative efforts of several former hostages and families of victims of state-sponsored kidnapping. Its Directoral Committee includes patrons ‘Ana Diamond’ (former hostage and Oxford scholar) and ‘Narges Mohammadi’ (recipient of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize), as well as former hostage Dr Eleanor Abbott and senior experts Mahia Farrokh, Sema Jalili, and SH Vaghfi, all under the leadership of Dr Marika Ojala. The Most Reverenced Dr A. Dyamond serves as the Alliance’s Honorary Vice-Patron.

A core element of our mission is combating the rise of hostage diplomacy—also known as state hostage-taking—a criminal practice that increasingly targets women and girls for political or financial leverage.

Our mission is twofold:

1. To campaign for the release of hostages and the return of disappeared or unlawfully detained citizens.

2. To provide practical, emotional, and advocacy support to victims and their families.

Working with local NGOs, legal experts, and apolitical international partners, we press governments to adopt stronger victim-centred policies, improve transparency, and uphold their duty to protect citizens abroad. We advocate for accountability under international law, including the International Convention against the Taking of Hostages (1983), and for modern legal frameworks that recognise hostage-taking as a criminal human rights violation, not a diplomatic instrument.

We come from many countries and backgrounds, united in keeping the plight of Hostagesses visible to the world. Through our network, we assist governments in repatriating disappeared or abducted citizens and support victims and their families in their pursuit of justice. Beyond advocacy, the Hostagesses Alliance promotes arts, philanthropy, and education as means of awareness, resilience, social healing and also challenging state abuse, and ensure that survivors and their families are never isolated or silenced.

The Hostagesses Alliance was officially launched at the constituent Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 2021. The organization traces its roots to the ‘'Families Alliance Against State Hostage Taking'’, an earlier initiative formed by former hostages and families of detainees including our founder Ana Diamond to campaign against governments or paramilitary groups that use kidnapped individuals as diplomatic bargaining chips. That movement was formally introduced at the ‘United Nations General Assembly’ in New York on 24 September 2019.

Today, the Hostagesses Alliance serves as a model for women-led crisis-management NGOs, working to enhance the safety and mobility of women and girls worldwide while confronting kidnapping and unlawful detention on a global scale.

Since its establishment, the Hostagesses Alliance has been actively engaged in addressing the unlawful detention and kidnapping of several notable individuals, including but not limited to Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic formerly imprisoned in Iran; late engineer Kamal Foroughi, a British-Iranian business consultant who was recognised as the oldest hostage of all time ever recorded in the world’s hostage history, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian mother held in Tehran for nearly six years; Anoosheh Ashoori, a retired British engineer unjustly detained in Iran; Aras Amiri, a cultural officer at the British Council who spent about three years, imprisoned in Iran on unfounded charges.

Our Alliance has also supported Craig and Lindsay Foreman, a British couple arrested in Iran in January 2025, and has advocated for the victims of the 7 October 2023 kidnappings in Israel, with particular focus on the case of Emily Damari, a British national from London who was among the civilians abducted that day.

Since the 1970s, countless individuals and families have seen their freedom destroyed through escalating acts of kidnapping and hostage-taking. We call on everyone who can help—please do not wait.

The world is witnessing a disturbing rise in state-sponsored kidnapping and hostage-taking. These ruthless acts increasingly target academics, students, vulnerable girls, and mothers. Victims often receive little or no consular assistance, and many governments have failed to respond adequately. Western democracies, too, have fallen short in protecting their citizens, allowing this grave security threat to persist unchecked.

Our Call to Mobilisation

The Hostagesses Alliance urges public to move beyond ineffective ‘silent status’ and take coordinated, decisive action against states that practise hostage-taking. Stronger condemnation and collective measures are urgently needed before more innocent lives are destroyed.

Our Seven Core Aims

1. Keep the plight of hostages visible in global public awareness.

2. Raise attention to individual cases and help bring abducted or disappeared citizens home.

3. Press the United Nations and world governments to treat state hostage-taking as a global crime, focusing especially on ending this practice in China, Turkey, Iran, North Korea, Russia as well as few African countries.

4. Assist former victims and their families in campaigns for justice.

5. Advocate punishment of hostage-takers through democratic institutions, civil society, and partner NGOs.

6. Provide care and rehabilitation for survivors of state-sponsored abduction and for families affected by terrorism.

7. Promote the arts, philanthropy, and education in line with the 1983 International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages.

State-sponsored hostage-taking has destroyed lives for decades—tearing families apart, undermining international law, and threatening global security. This crisis demands public attention, political will, and collective action.

If you believe in justice and the protection of human dignity, we invite you to stand with us.

Please support our work, amplify our message, and help us bring all hostagesses and hostages home.