Ana Diamond

Ana Diamond is a former hostage and survivor of “hostage diplomacy”, taken by the IRGC as a teenage student and becoming the youngest recorded victim of state-sponsored hostage-taking. She endured solitary confinement, torture, a mock execution, and years of political persecution linked to wider UK–Iran diplomatic disputes, before eventually securing release.

Her case has been documented at the UN Human Rights Council and UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and she has since become a respected advocate, working to expose state hostage-taking as a human-rights violation and a tool of political extortion.

Upon her return to the UK, Ana co-founded the Alliance Against Hostage-Taking organisation, drawing from her lived experience and accrued knowledge to support former hostages, their families, and campaign for those currently detained. She has since played a visible role in high-profile advocacy efforts, including campaigns for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Emily Damari, and other state-held detainees, while contributing to national awareness through interviews with outlets such as Sky News, BBC, The Times and The Guardian.

Alongside her activism, Ana is an award-winning academic and writer. She is an Alistair Horne Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Clarendon Scholar, and a socio-political commentator whose work has appeared in major broadcast and print media.

Drawing on her trauma and recovery, she has contributed to policy discussions on sanctions, accountability, and victim-centred approaches to international detention, including collaboration on the UK’s Magnitsky human-rights sanctions framework. She continues to lend her voice to public discourse, delivers talks in schools and universities nationwide, and provides emotional and practical support to families navigating hostage situations.

As the founder, Ana embodies the organisation’s mission: defending victims, confronting state abuse, and challenging the systems that enable hostage-taking to persist.

AKC Oxon

¹ https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/west-tip-toeing-around-tehrans-hostage-diplomacy-9xlp9q3v2

² https://news.sky.com/story/craig-and-lindsay-foreman-west-has-failed-to-counter-tehrans-hostage-diplomacy-says-former-iranian-prisoner-13311342