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“My husband is a hostage. Free him now”

September 11, 2018
2 min read
News of Xiyue Wang's sentence emerged in 2017, but he has been in prison since 2016
News of Xiyue Wang's sentence emerged in 2017, but he has been in prison since 2016

The wife of a detained academic has called on the Iranian government to release him and urged human rights groups to do everything they can to help after the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention announced he was being held in Iran illegally.

On August 23, the Working Group stated that the Iranian government had “no legal basis for the arrest and detention” of Princeton academic Xiyue Wang and that he should be “released immediately.” The statement was issued ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, which gets underway on September 18 in New York.

In a statement sent out to media outlets and international human rights and advocacy groups, Xiyue Wang’s wife Hua Qu called on the United States government to take “concrete action” to free her husband, who she described as a “hostage” who had endured “cruel” treatment, including repeated interrogations and being held in solitary confinement. She also said his health is “rapidly deteriorating.”

At the same time, she appealed for greater media coverage on her husband’s case. 

News of the 10-year prison sentence for Xiyue Wang, a Chinese-American graduate student, emerged in July 2017, but he had been detained since August 2016. As in many cases of jailed foreigners, dual nationals, activists and journalists, the family had been encouraged to remain silent about the case and were informed that this was the best way of ensuring a quick release. 

At the time of sentencing, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, the deputy head of the Iranian judiciary, described him as a “US tool of infiltration who holds double nationality and was controlled directly by Americans."

Hua Qu denied her husband was a spy, but instead "a historian who loves Persian culture.”  Xiyue Wang also went to Afghanistan in 2010, where he served as a Pashtun interpreter for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). 

“His unlawful arrest, his prolonged detention in spite of having a valid visa and research permit, and his sentencing to a 10-year jail term all represent a miscarriage of justice and an assault on academic freedom,” Hua Qu said. "I cannot believe very soon my husband will serve in Evin prison double the time served by the diplomats in the first hostage crisis in 1979. Xiyue is the only non-dual national American citizen currently in custody in Iran." 

She also spoke of the distress of their five-year-old son, who asks: “Why can’t Daddy come home?”  

 

Read more: 

American Prisoner in Iran "Would Make a Lousy Spy”

 

 

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