Advocacy

Anāhitā Diamond is a former British-Iranian hostage in Iran. Placed under a travel ban in 2014 and detained in Evin Prison in 2016, she was eventually acquitted and returned to the UK in 2018. The following year, she co-founded the Alliance Against State Hostage-Taking with Richard Ratcliffe, Jason Rezaian, Nizar Zakka and other hostage families, launching the initiative during the 74th United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Her advocacy has focused on redress and reparations for survivors of state hostage-taking and arbitrary detention. In 2019–20, she worked with Hogan Lovells to prepare victim testimonies on Iran’s state-hostage practices for submission to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran. She later contributed to the work of Alice Jill Edwards, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, for her report examining hostage-taking through the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

She has also worked with Amnesty International, Freedom from Torture, and Hostage International, and collaborated with BBC Panorama on a feature documentary on the detention of foreign and dual nationals as instruments of state leverage in Iran.

Through the Families Alliance, Diamond campaigned for targeted sanctions against perpetrators of serious human-rights abuses. In 2020, she collaborated with REDRESS on a proposal to Parliament for the use of Magnitsky sanctions against human-rights perpetrators in Iran; the UK introduced its first autonomous Global Human Rights sanctions regime that July. She later gave evidence to Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, advocating for sanctions against those responsible for state hostage-taking and for frozen assets to be used in rehabilitation of survivors.

In 2023, Diamond worked again with REDRESS on draft legislation for a Legal Right to Consular Assistance, seeking greater protection for British nationals facing serious human-rights violations abroad.

Diamond remains active in human rights advocacy, particularly women’s rights, most recently supporting the End Gender Apartheid campaign led by Iranian and Afghan women.