Wife Of Australian Engineer Jailed In Iraq Threatens Hunger Strike To Force His Release

The wife of an Australian engineer jailed in Iraq has threatened to start a hunger strike outside the Iraqi embassy in London, unless the Baghdad authorities act to release him.

Robert Pether and his Egyptian colleague Khaled Zhagoul are currently serving five-year terms in Al-Muthanna jail in Baghdad, after a contract they were working on to build a new headquarters for the Central Bank of Iraq turned sour. The men were arrested in April 2021 after travelling to Baghdad to meet with the governor of the Central Bank.

A hard-hitting report (pdf) by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, issued in March, said the men were being arbitrarily detained and called on the government to release them immediately.

However, there has been no positive movement on the case for months and Robert’s wife Desree said she is very concerned about his health.

“Robert and Khaled have sat there for almost 20 months trying to work out how to prove their innocence,” she said. “They weren’t ever allowed to present any evidence to prove they were innocent. They are pawns in a game of chess. They’re collateral damage.”

A succession of additional charges have been levelled at the two men since their arrest, with the authorities now seeking $50 million from them – up from an initial fine of $12 million. What is frustrating for the men and their families is they are not even clear about what the money is for.

“It’s fluid. It keeps changing,” says Desree. “Even with the $12 million from their court case last year we’ve never received an official explanation of what it is for. We vaguely know what it is for, but we don’t know completely.”

The two men applied for a retrial about ten weeks ago but that application was recently turned down.

Desree held a protest outside the Iraqi embassy in London on November 22, in an effort to raise awareness of the case and to try and put pressure on the Iraqi authorities to resolve the situation. She says she is prepared to go further.

“It can’t keep going on. It’s getting worse and worse. Robert and Khaled see it as a life sentence. They’re absolutely rock bottom,” she said, speaking in London the day after her protest.

She has since gone back to Ireland, where she now lives with their three children, but plans to return soon.

“I said to the embassy: I need to see improvement in the next two weeks. Things have gone downhill. If anyone can’t see it’s a hostage situation then they’re either complicit or just as corrupt as the people that are doing this. I said this has to stop. The impunity has to stop.

“And if that doesn’t change in the next two weeks I’m coming back and I’m going to sit out the front and do a hunger strike. I can’t sit by and watch him be slowly murdered and do nothing.”

Desree Pether is hoping the recent change in government in Baghdad may help to resolve the situation. Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani took office on October 28 and she has called on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to press his counterpart to resolve the situation.

“There’s a new prime minister in Iraq and it would be really awesome if Albanese would make a call to congratulate him and perhaps mention the fact that he spoke to the previous prime minister 16-17 weeks ago and nothing has improved and in fact it’s gotten worse,” she said.

The UN Working Group report issued in March set out a deeply troubling account of the ordeal that Pether and Zhagoul have endured, with claims of torture and mistreatment, an unfair trial, lack of access to legal counsel and a failure by the authorities to respond adequately to serious medical issues.

The UN report judged the two men were initially held in “a situation of de facto enforced disappearance” and that the Iraqi state had violated several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The report said the arrest and detention of the two men was arbitrary, as were the violations of their right to a fair trial and due process. The report concluded by calling on the Iraqi government to “immediately and unconditionally release” the two men.

The Iraqi government has not yet given a formal response to the Working Group report.

Neither the Iraqi embassy in London nor Pether and Zhagoul’s employer CME Consulting responded to requests for comments for this article.