The wife of a man who is in jail in Iraq is rallying hundreds of supporters to oppose a new Iraqi embassy in Ireland.
Desree Pether, 52, from Roscommon, fears for her husband Robert, 47, who had melanoma (the most serious type of skin cancer) in 2005, and has been locked up in Baghdad since April of last year.
A request by Iraq to open an embassy in Dublin was presented by Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney to Cabinet on Tuesday and approved, but there is no timeline for when the embassy will open.
Desree is outraged and has written letters to both Taoiseach Micheal Martin, who raised Robert’s case in the Dail, and Minister Coveney.
She has urged them to seize on Iraq’s request as an opportunity to press for her husband’s release.
A petition that she launched on Thursday on the change.org website attracted nearly 400 signatures within hours.
Desree told the Mirror: “I have written to Minister Coveney and the Taoiseach Martin to ask that a caveat be attached whereby an embassy is not opened until Robert Pether is free.
“I don’t want to be that person standing in the way of any inter-country relationships, and I’m all for Iraq benefiting from a relationship with Ireland, but at some point we have to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough’.
“I have met with the Iraq embassy in London and I know that many officials have reached out multiple times to try and bring an end to this situation.
“To try and rectify the mistakes that have been made and do the right thing and release an innocent man who has been treated horrendously for over 18 months.
“The UN Arbitrary Detention working group issued a report in March, citing multiple human rights and international law violations, and called for Robert’s immediate unconditional release.
“Robert lives in Ireland. Myself and the children are Irish citizens. There needs to be accountability and someone needs to stand up for Robert.”
Robert was jailed in a €20 million contract row between his Dubai-based employer and the Central Bank of Iraq.
Iraq locked him up amid a €20m row about construction delays during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Robert’s family say he was jailed in April 2021 but was not allowed to see lawyers until two days before his trial in February of this year – and he was then sentenced to five years in prison and fined €10m.
Desree is hoping for a retrial and said yesterday: “We have been waiting on an answer to an application for retrial.
“There is new evidence that will hopefully clear this all up once and for all and clear his name and get him home to us.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone in the Irish government in a while. I think they’ve done all they could.
“We are continuing to appeal to the Australian government to do significantly more.”
Rob was held in Baghdad’s maximum security Al-Muthanna military detention centre where conditions were condemned as appalling by the UN.
He has suffered kidney and bladder infections, lost considerable weight,
suffered blackouts, and fears cancer has returned.
The engineer, who is from Australia and has applied for Irish citizenship,
lives in Roscommon with wife Desree and kids Flynn, 19, Oscar, 17, and Nala, 10.
Irish Government officials recently told the Irish Mirror: “The Department of Foreign Affairs is aware of developments in the case of Mr Pether.”
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