Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You
Hostage-Taking, Ransom, and Duty of Care
- The Government of Canada exercises its “duty of care” to its citizens abroad by identifying high risk areas, and by responding through consular and other means to kidnappings and hostage-takings.
- Canada also has a strict policy that prohibits ransom payments to terrorists or criminals.
- This policy was a factor in the 2016 beheadings of Canadians John Ridsdel and Robert Hall, who were taken hostage by the Abu Sayaaf Group in the Southern Philippines.
- It also prolonged the 2008 hostage ordeal of Canadian Amanda Lindhout in Somalia, forcing her family to rely on personal assets and private donations to raise her ransom.
- Private companies and NGOs proposing to send personnel into high-risk zones have a duty of care to their employees and volunteers.
- Any deployment must be preceded by meaningful threat and risk assessment; professional training around safe travel practices; rigorous in-country security and protective measures; a response plan (including the possibility of ransom payment); and care for family and survivors.
Canadians In A Dangerous World
The January 29 abduction of 10 employees of a Canadian mining company operating in the Mexican state of Sinaloa is a stark reminder that the world is full of dangerous places. And as political and economic uncertainty spreads, the number of places that can be classified as “high-risk” proliferate. In January 2026, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) updated its list of “avoid all travel” advisories to include Venezuela and Iran. They join a long-standing list of about 20 countries, including Haiti, North Korea, Ukraine, and Yemen, where Canadian travellers are judged to be in danger and where there would be little chance of Canadian consular or diplomatic intervention in an emergency. Notably, GAC advises against all non-essential travel to and within Sinaloa.
The “travel advice” for Afghanistan is comprehensive and conveys a sense of the rationale underlying GAC’s “avoid all travel” designation for the countries on the list. Apart from crime and terrorism, it also lists hazards like landmines and unexploded ordnance, forced marriage, random violence, demonstrations, and telecommunications and internet blackouts. Prominence is given to extrajudicial kidnapping and hostage taking. It warns of a “very high risk” of kidnapping (and killing) of foreign nationals by terrorist actors, with tourists, journalists, teachers, NGO workers, and physicians and other practitioners as particular targets. It also refers to “kidnap-for-ransom groups…[that]…sell their captives to terrorist groups, with victims potentially facing years in captivity.”
Low Hanging Fruit and Duty of Care
GAC’s advice is based on painstaking threat and risk assessment and constitutes an important component of the Government of Canada’s “duty of care” towards Canadians contemplating travel abroad. Nevertheless, Canadians still travel to global hot zones, often in large numbers. Recent CIBs have touched upon the economic and investment possibilities to be found in dangerous places like Venezuela and the Southern Philippines. But it’s not always about opportunity. As above, Canadians find themselves in dangerous places all the time, often for good reasons. Most of them lack the (sometimes questionable) protection afforded by “official” status as a Canadian diplomat or public servant. They are, in short, highly vulnerable and, from the perspective of a would-be hostage-taker, low hanging fruit.
The Government of Canada also fulfils its duty of care in its response to hostage-takings abroad. If the incident is deemed to be a criminal matter, it is referred to GAC’s Consular, Security and Emergency Management Branch; if it is a terrorist hostage-taking, it is treated as a national security incident and managed by GAC’s Task Force on International Critical Incidents. Canadian officials. Canadian diplomats and consular officials work with counterparts in the country where the incident happened or, if that is not possible, in nearby or allied countries. Federal police and intelligence assets, including investigators, negotiators, and intelligence officers and analysts, may also be deployed, whether in Canada or “on scene” overseas.
The Problem of Ransom
But whatever steps are taken to secure the release of Canadian hostages, there is one important consideration: the Government of Canada has a strict and longstanding policy that prohibits ransom payments to terrorists or to criminals.
Canada is not alone in its “no ransom” policy. Both the G7 and the United Nations, as well as Canada’s 5 Eyes partners, take a similar stance, at least publicly. The thinking behind most “no-ransom” policies is that paying ransom effectively rewards terrorist groups, in turn reinforcing the hostage-taking “behaviour.” So, paying ransom is basic operant conditioning at work. By extension, citizens of countries with “no ransom” policies in place would seem to be less attractive targets.
Just as importantly, commentators and analysts have long believed that ransom payments fund terrorist groups, thereby contributing to local violence and regional destabilization. The “textbook” example is Colombia, where groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) relied for decades on hostage-taking and the cocaine trade as sources of funding. This in turn had a profound and deleterious impact on virtually all aspects of Colombian society, Colombian politics and the Colombian economy.
However, recent scholarship has begun to cast doubt on the degree to which terrorist groups like ISIS rely on funding from ransom payments to finance terrorist attacks. More importantly, no-ransom policies do not seem to deter would-be hostage takers. There is evidence to suggest that terrorist hostages whose countries do not pay ransom are singled out for the most brutal treatment. Indeed, Canada’s no-ransom policy contributed to the grotesque murders of Canadians John Ridsdel and Robert Hall by the Abu Sayaaf Group in the Southern Philippines in 2016.
Fen Hampson, a Canadian academic and foreign policy commentator, believes that the state’s duty of care may also extend to ransom payments. Hampson has concluded that firm principles and guidelines around ransom payments and negotiations are ill-advised. By effectively eliminating a starting point for negotiations, such principles promote the kind of inflexibility that gets people, like Ridsdel and Hall, killed. More importantly, they allow governments to abdicate their responsibility for making difficult – and potentially unpopular – decisions.
On Your Own?
All of this means that Canadians taken hostage may ultimately be on their own. The Somali terrorists who kidnapped Amanda Lindhout, a Canadian freelance journalist, in 2008, demanded $1 million for her release. Over the 15 months of her captivity, Lindhout was forced by her abductors to call her mother and various Canadian media outlets, pleading for the ransom to be paid. While the Lindhout family initially cooperated with the Government of Canada, the official “no ransom” policy ultimately left them with what they believed to be no choice. A private consultant negotiated the return of Lindhout, along with an Australian who had been taken along with her and paid out a ransom raised through private donations and the selling off of Lindhout family assets.
The reality of terrorist hostage-taking, and its effectiveness, is almost universally recognized. Companies offering “kidnap and ransom insurance” proliferate. Some countries, such as Australia, specifically advise their nationals to take out kidnapping insurance when travelling to certain parts of the world. And anecdotal evidence suggests that in the multinational resource extraction sector, which routinely functions in highly unstable regions, kidnap and ransom funds are often a component of corporate budgets. The threat of kidnapping, it seems, is just another component of the cost of doing business.
Doing Business in Dangerous Places
Terrorist hostage taking-for-ransom flourishes in places where corruption at all levels of society is the rule rather than the exception. There are tremendous challenges associated with attempting to conduct investigations to a Canadian standard in an environment that is not only alien, but in which there is little, if any, legal foundation and in which the local authorities may be working against you, if not complicit in crime and extremism themselves.
Canada, like most Western countries, has extremely stringent legislation, the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act in particular, prohibiting Canadian nationals, Canadian businesses, and Canadian government agencies from engaging in corrupt activities, including the payment of bribes. While this is morally laudable, it can affect our ability to function in an expedient manner. The status of privately raised ransom payment vis-à-vis terrorism financing legislation also remains a legal and procedural grey area, domestically and internationally.
As noted above, many companies that operate in volatile environments seem prepared to take steps to adapt to those environments. This may include budgeting for ransom payments, whether or not the funds are actually earmarked as such. So, the real question here is: does adherence to Canadian norms in environments where Canadian norms do not apply put the lives of Canadians at risk? And if so, how far are we prepared to go in adapting to those local norms and in bringing our people home safely?
Why Is This Important?
Duty of care is not just a responsibility of the state. Any company or organization that contemplates sending its staff or volunteers into an area that is at high risk for criminal or terrorist hostage-taking needs to take all possible steps to ensure their safety.
These steps should include in-depth threat and risk assessment undertaken prior to deployment; professionally delivered and comprehensive training so that risks are clearly laid out and staff understand the need for “travel hygiene” in the form of situational awareness and other safe travel practices; and in-country protocols, up to and including physical security planning and implementation, for at-risk personnel.
If the worst happens, a response strategy should be in place, including the identification of negotiators and an extraction plan. Company / organizational ransom policies should be clearly defined and understood by all. If that policy is to negotiate and pay a ransom, funds must be available. Finally, a professional support network for families and survivors must be on hand and available for the entirety of a hostage-taking, as well as its aftermath.
To paraphrase the New Zealand government’s SafeTravel website, a company or organization that can’t afford this level of threat / risk management and response probably can’t afford to send its personnel into high risk situations.