FeaturesThis interview provides an overview of advocacy efforts to secure the release of Ryan Corbett, a US citizen who the Taliban have detained in Afghanistan for over two years, his health deteriorating drastically as a result. JURIST’s Managing Editor for Long Form Content James Joseph interviewed Corbett’s Washington-based lawyer Ryan Fayhee and UK Barrister Kate Gibson, who has been working to free Corbett.
Fayhee, a former US Justice Department official now in private practice, became involved in hostage diplomacy advocacy after meeting with the family of Paul Whelan, an American unlawfully detained in Russia since late 2018. Through this work, he met Gibson and together they became involved in advocating for other wrongful detention cases such as Paul Rusesabagina.
Gibson is an international lawyer who has represented high-profile defendants, such as former Liberian President Charles Taylor, before international criminal tribunals. She was the Lead Counsel to Rusesabagina during his detention and was later asked by Fayhee to assist in Ryan Corbett’s case.
The two lawyers emphasized the need for international pressure on the Taliban, as the US government appears currently to be acting alone, albeit with the assistance of its protecting power Qatar. Fayhee and Gibson also advocated for engaging other countries to put pressure on the Taliban at the UN and in their dealings with Afghanistan. They also discussed the growing issue of “hostage diplomacy” and the challenges in addressing it, suggesting the need for multilateral deterrent measures and coordination between countries on these cases.
JURIST: How did you get to the point of Ryan being taken hostage, and how did this unfold?
Ryan Fayhee: He was in Afghanistan. He had spent more than a decade there working on various humanitarian issues and had his family there. He is a fluent Pashto speaker and was deeply committed to being there and was invited back through official channels with a travel visa and encouragement following the evacuation. So, he followed pretty clearly within the lines and felt comfortable going back on his own to check on his business and to continue his mission as many people from around the globe had gone back to continue that work, despite the risks. But I can’t say that the granting of the visa was in some way tied to a scheme to arrest an American, but what I can say is that the reason for his detention and his continued detention is because of his status as an American. And, it is transparently hostage diplomacy. He’s being detained. He’s being treated the way that he’s being treated. He’s being held only for the purposes of extracting some benefit out of the US government.
What I have learned in the course of this case is that we the United States, and I think maybe other countries like the Gulf States, do have leverage over Afghanistan. The Taliban of the past, I’m sure obviously there’s remnants of that politically, but the Taliban want to be, so they say, part of the world community. They’re very sensitive, for example, to the news media around this case. When somebody on Capitol Hill questions whether or not foreign aid ought to continue to be sent in connection with Ryan’s case, they watch that news media and they react to it, and Ryan’s conditions seem to improve. There are elements within it who want to be part of the world community, who want to be taken seriously. And I share that because I think the pressure from the US has been growing and it’s been valuable, but it’s not nearly enough. I think Gulf countries need to have the courage to push them in the right direction, as do other European states. That’s why we’re in the UN. And really, it’s a call to all the member states to take Ryan’s case on as a way to address this broader hostage diplomacy problem because anyone who engages in such transparent hostage-taking as a means of conducting foreign policy has to be isolated immediately and not engaged with until and unless they move on from this foreign policy outlook. And by the way, Ryan’s one of two Americans in the same boat, both arrested for exactly the same reason.
JURIST: There’s been a move filed by the Special Rapporteur on torture in Ryan’s case, and I’ve had an updated response from their office today. What leverage do you think that can do? What can this do for Ryan?
Kate Gibson: Well, I think this world of hostage diplomacy is an incredibly complex and fraught area of practice, not least because some states do it quite well, but others don’t. Some states react well when their citizens are taken, and others just don’t. Ryan Fayhee and I have worked on a case of a dual citizen, Paul Rusesabagina, and had completely different experiences depending on which government we’re dealing with. Ryan Corbett is a US citizen, which means that he has the benefit of the US government’s machinations when it comes to hostage diplomacy, and Roger Carstens, the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA) officially designated Ryan on the 10th of October as an American wrongfully detained abroad. And that unlocks a whole lot of tools that exist in the Levinson Act of 2021 and essentially makes it American foreign policy that Ryan should be brought home. The SPEHA office does this and does it really well. And I know that Ambassador Carstens is engaged in efforts to have a more multilateral and global approach to what is essentially a global issue of transnational repression and hostage-taking.
The problem we have in Ryan’s case is that even with the weight of the SPEHA office behind this case, he’s still there. 677 days. I’ve been in and around detainees for the last two decades, and it’s not an exaggeration to say I think Ryan’s case is probably the worst I’ve seen in terms of the inhumane conditions of his detention. I’m surprised he’s still alive, given what he’s enduring. You get a flavor of it from the Special Rapporteur’s statement, where she unequivocally states that his conditions violate the prohibition against torture. Ryan doesn’t have access to sunlight. He’s not getting sufficient food. He doesn’t get medical care. He’s developed severe medical conditions. And unlike other cases I’ve been involved in, when the detainees call home it gives reassurance to the families. With Ryan, there have only been eight phone calls in 677 days. The person who’s calling back to the family isn’t the Ryan they recognize, which is extremely concerning. So, the urgency of this can’t be overstated. The US government understands the urgency of this. Anyone who’s human would understand the urgency of this situation, and yet there’s this blockage. So, we then as the legal team have to think outside the box.
One of the obvious levers we can pull is the UN special procedures lever that exists, and we’re really grateful for that. And the UN Special Rapporteur for torture was seized on the 25th of April, and here we are in June and we have a statement from her. We also seized the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. It’s useful because we have arguably the world’s leading expert on torture saying this is what is happening. So the avenue for people disputing the facts around these cases becomes smaller and smaller.
We also saw that the Taliban, after we filed and made quite a public filing of these requests to the UN special procedures in April, responded and said things that we knew not to be true but were trying to gloss over and patch this up. “No, no. He does have medical care. No, he’s he is getting some sunlight.” They’ve responded to this. And that plays into the larger point that Ryan and you were discussing, which is this idea of legitimacy. So, for us, you can’t claim to want to be a member of the international community and kidnap Americans and put them in basement cells for two years. We can’t stand for this as an international community, and the UN special procedures is a way in which we can have these statements that are reflective of the larger UN community calling this out. So, I think it is useful to do it, and we’re grateful that these avenues, these multilateral avenues exist.
JURIST: Do you know of anything to give us a flavor of what is happening to Ryan and the precarity of his situation and a sense of where we’re at with his condition?
Kate Gibson: I think every day is a roll of the dice in terms of his current situation. He is suffering from blackouts, he can’t easily stand up, numbness, eyesight deteriorating, hearing deteriorating, he describes his skin as being like a crocodile. Ryan was a fit 39- or 40-year-old when he was taken, but if you put any human in a basement cell for that amount of time, without basic medical care, nutrients, exercise, sunlight, or socialization, it doesn’t matter who you are; that can only sustain these conditions for a certain amount of time. And we’re now at the point where someone who was such a dedicated father and such a dedicated humanitarian will get on the phone to his wife and children, and he doesn’t even have the capacity to ask about how they are. I think it could not be more urgent, the situation that he’s in.
Ryan Fayhee: I mean, the conditions of confinement, just to make some comparison, it’s not as if we’re doing a comparison between the ways civilized countries treat their own prisoners, but the facts are the facts, and 20 minutes a month of outside time is reprehensible. And again, it’s putting on Ryan’s shoulders the relationship with the United States and what the Taliban wishes to achieve. I think Kate is exactly right, enduring what he’s had to endure for over two years, and on his wife’s shoulders, having to advocate in the way she has in order to receive occasional six-minute phone calls, pretty much fails every test of the civilized world that exists. And once again, if the Taliban want to be legitimate and seen as legitimate leaders of that country, our job is to basically make it impossible for other countries to support Afghanistan in any way until and unless they’ve moved on from this, the treatment of not just American but European citizens in order to progress their foreign policy.
JURIST: What’s next for you guys in terms of what the UN can do and in terms of the US State Department? What can be done?
Ryan Fayhee: We’ve come a long way in a little over a year. We’ve got, just in terms of in the US, what I think is the first bipartisan Senate resolution passed, the Republican and the Democratic leaders of the Senate, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell. That’s done, which is amazing. We’ve got the same in the House, and we have absolutely anything we need from the US Congress in terms of their powers of the purse, their oversight of the State Department, and so on and so forth. We have Roger Carstens, the SPEHA, involved now for a very long time and constantly engaged on the matter. We’re in regular communications with top State Department leadership. We’re obviously also engaged at the National Security Council at the White House. And we really have Washington DC buckled down.
I do think that ultimately there’s going to have to be a hard decision made by the White House in order to secure Ryan’s release. And so the next move here is to get people to a point where they can make—I don’t know what that decision is necessarily, but I know that there’s a lot of activity and a lot of meetings but not as much action as we’d like to see today, but we certainly have all of the political inertia we need to move this forward. But the US is doing it unfortunately in isolation right now.
And so our effort I think is about to begin outside of the US while continuing the pressure on the US side as Congress considers whether or not to limit any continued humanitarian funding, which is not something that Congress often does because that money is intended for the Afghan people. But that’s where we are left here. I think now we need to get other countries on board, particularly once again the Gulf states and Europeans, who are acting in Afghanistan.
Kate Gibson: I think that’s absolutely right. We need a broader multilateral approach to hostage-taking in general but also specifically for Ryan’s case. It should disturb everyone in Sweden, Finland, France, Australia, and Canada that the Taliban has the ability to do this to someone and at the same time seek to receive support and assistance and eventually acceptance by the international community. This can’t go hand in hand.
Yes, Ryan is American and has the weight of the US government behind him and supporting him, but this is a much larger issue. It’s just as disturbing for the Americans when someone like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe gets taken. Last week, we saw this hostage exchange between Sweden and Iran; that is literally a global issue, and the currency of kidnapping and hostage-taking is something that we can’t just stamp out as individual nations. So, we really are seeking to engage other states, particularly those who have dealings in Afghanistan to put Ryan on the agenda and try and convey that this is just unacceptable, like things can’t move forward. This should be a blockage. This shouldn’t be an impasse. Ryan should be an irritant in any relationship between a civilized state and the Taliban.
In terms of how we’re going to go about doing that, Anna, Ryan’s wife, is also French, so that’s where we’re going to start because we need people to become engaged with this story. Ryan has the benefit of having this incredible family, his wife Anna, who has been unbelievably stoic and kind throughout all of this. His three children’s lives have obviously just been transformed. It’s particularly difficult this week for the family because one of the milestones that we were using and advocating around, particularly with US government contacts, was Ryan’s oldest daughter who’s 18 graduates from high school next week. And that was a big push that we have, to get him home for her graduation. We’re going to miss that, right? So then we have to as a larger team, with the family and the legal team, regroup and try and find new avenues to advocate around. But, more broadly, we’re moving, shifting to not be so US-centric in our efforts but really to try and bring the larger international community in to realize that this is something that’s going to be much more effectively addressed internationally.
JURIST: It seems like such a prevalent currency now, hostage diplomacy. How do we get around it and how do we deal with this? Is it that there needs to be some sort of mechanism? What’s the way to work around this?
Ryan Fayhee: So there’s a larger conversation here around this question. Maybe the only other thing harder than recovering a hostage is how to design effective deterrent measures to prevent their taking in the first place. And I’m probably prejudiced as having been a former sanctions prosecutor from all the way back prior to the broad acceptance of this concept of sanctions outside of the US. But I think there’s something to it if you think about how—people can debate whether or not the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, whether the sanctions that followed have been effective. They’re certainly not perfect, and there’s not going to be any perfection in deterring hostage diplomacy. But what I will say is that I was absolutely amazed by the ability of at least the US and Europe and many other countries in Asia to come around and respond to Russia in ways that were super sophisticated. They were fast, and they were pretty well organized.
And it seems to me that there’s something to that with this growing problem because there’s a set number of countries that seem to be targeted [for hostage diplomacy] over and over again, those countries seem to be the US and members of the EU. And I think that, the US for example, has some sanctions authorities to designate persons responsible for hostage diplomacy as set out in the Robert Levinson Act. But those authorities really don’t exist, at least in name, in other jurisdictions. So, I think it’s in part finding ways to make the cost of hostage diplomacy much higher. Those things tend to work better or at least provide some deterrence to nation-states in ways that terrorist groups and others may not be as susceptible to. But really, it is all about trying to craft deterrent measures in a way that’s not just the US acting on its own and in isolation as it has been in the past. There just needs to be greater consistency. I also understand other countries—the UK in particular is considering having its own SPEHA office to have somebody run strategy on point on this topic. And I think having somebody like that, perhaps across the EU, might make some sense, just to have a portal of entry in order to be able to consider swift measures in response to this type of conduct. So for me, that’s the low-hanging fruit of what I think could quickly be established using the sanctions and export control measures that have grown over the past few years as the best existing authorities to try to tap this onto.
