Senators Urge Pompeo to Press for Release of Americans Overseas
Senators Urge Pompeo to Press for Release of Americans Overseas
(Bloomberg) --
A bipartisan group of senators including Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy and Florida Republican Marco Rubio has asked Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to urge foreign governments to release American detainees, citing the health risk from the coronavirus pandemic.
In a letter sent Friday, Murphy, Rubio and the other senators, including Texas Republican John Cornyn and Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, ask Pompeo “to strongly press foreign governments to immediately release American citizens unjustly detained abroad, as well as political prisoners, on humanitarian grounds.”
“Detention facilities are a fertile breeding ground for Covid-19, with rampant overcrowding, lack of basic hygiene, ill-equipped medical facilities, and poor health conditions,” the letter says. “In many authoritarian countries, these conditions are further exacerbated by inhumane conditions including malnutrition, medical neglect, and torture.”
The letter specifically mentions several prisoners, including Austin Tice in Syria, the so-called Citgo 6 in Venezuela, Morad Tahbaz and Siamak Namazi in Iran and Paul Whelan in Russia.
“This is not the time for these regimes to use people’s lives as bargaining chips; it is a time to provide humanitarian relief as we face the global threat of Covid-19,” the senators wrote.
Pompeo has already made it a priority to seek the release of Americans detained abroad, including in Iran, because of the coronavirus pandemic. In March, he demanded that Iran release Americans unjustly detained there, saying that their detention “amid increasingly deteriorating conditions defies basic human decency.”
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