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Alice Edwards
Britain now has a senior official whose job is to bring home citizens wrongfully detained abroad. Australia decided it doesn’t need one.
With states increasingly weaponising hostage diplomacy, and Australians facing heightened dangers, the government has rejected a Senate recommendation for a special envoy for wrongfully detained Australians.
Britain appointed former Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt as its first envoy for complex consular detentions. In cases referred to him by the foreign secretary, he will provide senior strategic oversight, co-ordinate work across government, engage with families and offer ministers an independent perspective.
Hostage diplomacy is coercion through deliberately inflicted suffering: the definition of torture reduced to statecraft.
Australia has chosen a different course. In its formal response to the Senate inquiry in June, the government said it “partially accepts” the recommendation. It will retain its complex case committee and appoint special envoys only when officials decide the case requires one, arguing this provides flexibility across a diverse caseload.
In my four years as United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other ill-treatment, my caseload returned again and again to hostage diplomacy: individuals detained abroad not for anything they had done, but for what they were worth. I dealt with families as angry with their own governments as with the kidnappers – because they felt ignored and their demands unanswered. What they wanted was rarely complicated. They wanted to know that someone senior was responsible, and that the file would not go quiet when the official handling it moved on.
This practice belongs in a torture mandate for a reason. Many former hostages report being both physically and psychologically tortured. Some are held in deplorable conditions, including in underground or dirty and windowless cells. When a person is held in solitary confinement, denied consular access and threatened with decades in prison so that their suffering – and their family’s – will force a government to pay, trade or concede, the pain is not incidental to the detention. It is the point of it.
That is coercion through deliberately inflicted suffering: the definition of torture reduced to statecraft.
And it is spreading. Reliable global figures are difficult to compile, but the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation recorded at least 142 Americans wrongfully detained between 2015 and 2025, against 54 in the preceding decade – a rise of 163 per cent. Canberra’s own travel advice warns of arbitrary detention in 10 countries, including China, Iran and Russia.
Australian writer Yang Hengjun remains imprisoned in China under a suspended death sentence. Another Australian citizen, Gordon Ng, is serving a sentence in Hong Kong under the territory’s national security law. Engineer Robert Pether cannot leave Iraq despite his release from prison, amid grave concerns about his health. Each case requires sustained senior advocacy across years, agencies and changes of personnel.
The government deserves credit for accepting parts of the Senate’s reform program: a published framework for assessing wrongful detention, better identification and data collection, stronger family support and deterrence as a foreign-policy priority. Yet the central problem remains. Responsibility is dispersed, and some cases may never be identified as wrongful detention at all.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who spent more than two years imprisoned in Iran on espionage charges she denied, benefited from an ad hoc Australian envoy who helped negotiate her release. Her concern is that most cases never receive comparable attention. “The vast majority of wrongful detention cases do not benefit from having an envoy appointed,” she told me.
Some remain within the complex case committee, while others “languish within the much larger pool of consular cases”, never recognised as wrongful in the first place. Australian businessman Mohammed “Mo” Munshi, released from prison in June 2024, for example, remains trapped in Mongolia under an indefinite travel ban.
That identification gap can determine whether a case receives a co-ordinated diplomatic strategy or is treated as an ordinary overseas prosecution. And the structure is vulnerable. When wars or mass evacuations occur, complex-case personnel are diverted into the all-hands response; staff rotation forces repeated handovers and disrupts relationships with families already living through prolonged uncertainty.
Britain’s model is modest but meaningful. Its envoy does not automatically assume every case; the foreign secretary refers them. The crucial distinction is continuity: Britain and other Australian allies, the US and Canada, have a standing senior official building expertise across a portfolio of cases.
Australia creates one only occasionally, requiring a new appointment, mandate and working structure each time. The Australian approach seems to prioritise bureaucracy over speedy, life-saving responses. It underestimates the importance of consistency over time, both for families and for building relations with the other side’s negotiating team.
Australia has heard what it should do from the UN before – in fact, from me. In December 2025, based on my findings as special rapporteur, the UN General Assembly declared for the first time that states have a duty to prevent hostage-taking as a form of torture. A duty to prevent is not discharged by a committee that convenes case by case, or by envoys appointed after a case has already attracted attention. It requires standing machinery: someone responsible for recognising these cases early, and someone answerable when they stall.
Australia is quick to bristle when UN bodies criticise its detention practices. Better to build the structure now than to become the example cited later.
Australia’s Senate committee recognised that some regimes practise hostage diplomacy because it works. The government accepted that finding. Moore-Gilbert’s experience proves an envoy can bring an Australian home. The question is: why would Australia limit access to that advocacy?
As we live through a period of growing volatility in interstate relations, the government must not play roulette with Australians trapped abroad.
Alice Edwards is a writer and lawyer and, for four years until July this year, was the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
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