Urgency Building To #FreeTheHostages As Sham Trial Begins

(New York, N.Y.) — On Sunday, Iranian-German dual-national and U.S. resident Jamshid Sharmahd went on trial in Iran some 19 months after being kidnapped in Dubai by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran. His trial, which has the potential to end in a death penalty conviction, comes just days after fellow hostage Benjamin Brière ended a hunger strike protesting the conditions of his captivity. Brière, a French national, has similarly been held since 2020 and was sentenced to eight years in prison for spying by an Iranian court.

More than 40 years after the start of the Iran hostage crisis, Iran continues to take Americans and other Westerners hostage, particularly persons who also hold Iranian citizenship. Iran takes hostages for several reasons. They serve as bargaining chips for the regime to extract geopolitical concessions from other countries. The government also seeks to punish undesirable behavior and send a message to Iranians to refrain from internal dissent. Finally, Iran does not recognize dual citizenship, so by targeting dual nationals, the regime demonstrates to the Iranian expatriate community that they are not beyond Tehran’s grasp.

Efforts to support the hostages and win their freedom have been reinvigorated in recent weeks by the #FreeTheHostages campaign launched by United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) Senior Advisor Barry Rosen during a five-day hunger strike last month in Vienna, Austria. As Rosen wrote on Tuesday in The Washington Post, the U.S. and its allies should abandon their piecemeal approach. Rather, “Tehran should be confronted with a multilateral effort. Americans, British, French, Austrians, Canadians, Swedes and Germans — all of whom count their fellow citizens as hostages in Iran — should band together to bring pressure. Strength is in numbers.”

To read UANI’s resource American And Western Hostages, please click here.

To read UANI Senior Advisor Barry Rosen’s op-ed in The Washington Post, please click here.