In the first half of September, lawyers for Australian detainee Robert Pether began seeing signs that the Iraqi authorities who had jailed him for four years and then prevented him from leaving the country were taking steps towards finally allowing him to go home.
Around that time, high-level diplomatic negotiations had convinced Iraq’s Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi that Pether should be released. But before that would happen, officials in Iraq said Pether needed to sign a waiver declaring authorities there had no liability for his treatment, which the United Nations has deemed was in violation of human rights.
Pether was under duress when he signed two different versions of that waiver, his lawyer Peter Griffin told Crikey, raising questions about whether the signing was in violation of international law. Pether was jailed in Baghdad in 2021 due to a dispute between his employer and the Central Bank of Iraq, and then released from prison in 2025 but prevented from leaving the country.
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In a claim not previously reported, Griffin said Australian diplomatic staff were present when the second waiver was signed in the second half of September. A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) spokesperson declined to comment, citing privacy obligations.
“Surely, the fact that the Iraqi state and the Central Bank of Iraq were preoccupied by the possibility of claims being brought against them by Rob tells us all we need to know about their own culpability and their understanding that they have acted in violation of international law,” Griffin said.
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‘No choice’
Pether called the pressure to sign the waiver “one final coercive act on the way out of the door”.
“I signed it because I wanted to go home. There was no choice,” Pether told reporters following his arrival in Ireland on Monday, where he lives with his wife Desree and their children, who have campaigned tirelessly for his release.
Among the very first things Pether did upon arrival in Dublin was execute a deed revoking the waiver he had signed in Iraq, Griffin said.
“No-one can articulate better than Robert Pether himself why it was wrong for the Iraqis to insist upon a waiver of this kind,” Griffin said. “As he stated in his speech on arrival at Dublin Airport, ‘Freedom should never have been something that had to be bargained for.’”
Griffin suspected the waivers were designed to prevent Pether from being able to sue over his treatment in the future.
“The waivers sought to foreclose some future avenues that Rob is entitled to have available to him when he turns his mind to those things,” Griffin said. “Right now, Rob and his family are recovering from an unimaginably traumatic experience, and their thoughts are on repairing their family and recovering from what has happened. There will be plenty of time in the future to think about accountability for what has happened.”
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It’s understood a copy of the deed revoking the waiver was handed to officials in Iraq on Wednesday, Australian time. Griffin said many aspects of the waivers Iraq sought were still unexplained, including what information DFAT had about the documents.
“I’m not suggesting DFAT was involved in the preparation of the documents, but they may — and they should — provide what information they have as to who or what entity authored those documents,” he explained.
“DFAT were the ones that told Rob that the signing of some sort of waiver was an [essential condition] of his authorisation to leave the country … we did not have any visibility as to their interactions with the Iraqi parties.”
Final hurdles
In the second half of September, around the time Pether signed the second version of the waiver, Prime Minister al-Zaidi authorised Pether and his fellow prisoner Khalid Radwan to be repatriated, according to Griffin.
Both men were engineers employed with the United Arab Emirates-based company CME Consulting, which had been contracted to construct new headquarters for the Central Bank of Iraq.
The pair were arrested on April 7, 2021, following a contractual dispute between CME Consulting and the bank, and were arbitrarily detained without a fair trial, as a way to “exercise leverage over their employer”, according to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
Pether and Radwan were released from jail in June last year, but prevented from accessing their passports or leaving Iraq. Both spent their first days outside of jail in a hotel, while Pether was later moved to a church sanctuary in Baghdad.
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“They literally picked me up when a homeless shelter was my only option, when I was gravely ill and out of funds and gave me shelter, support, kindness and friendship,” Pether said of the sanctuary in his homecoming remarks.
In the first week of October this year, Pether and Radwan were told senior officials had approved their departure from Iraq. That same week, they were informed that money laundering accusations levelled against them towards the end of their prison time had been dropped because of a lack of evidence. Griffin has previously labelled those charges “ridiculous, confected and ludicrous”.
In a final instance of what Griffin said was Iraq’s “mind-bending web of weaponised bureaucracy” used against the men, they were both accused of overstaying their visas and forced to pay a fine of US$500 each before they were granted final authorisation to leave Iraq.
Flying home
On Monday, Pether was escorted by Australian officials to an airport in Baghdad and boarded a plane to Dublin, via Istanbul.
While in the air, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong issued a statement to the Nine Network revealing Pether had left Iraq.
“I spoke with Robert Pether this morning. I expressed to him our relief that he had been released and my hope that he recovers, but most importantly, I wished him well for his reunion with the family and for his recovery in the future,” the story published in The Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere read.
The timing of Wong’s statement shocked Pether’s legal team, because he was yet to transit in Turkey and they feared negative coverage of his release could risk his completion of the final leg of the journey.
Upon arrival on Irish soil, Pether said he was “incredibly grateful” and “overwhelmed to finally be home”.
“But gratitude for being home does not erase what happened to me even for one second … justice would have been not trapping and taking us in the first place,” he told reporters. “Justice would have been accepting and recognising the evidence, respecting our rights and allowing us to return to our families. Justice would have been ending this when the United Nations found our detention arbitrary.
“And at the absolute minimum, justice would have meant that when the sentence imposed on me expired, I was free to leave. None of those things happened,” he continued. “There will be time to talk about that, there will be time to talk about what happened, why it happened, who was responsible and why nobody should ever be allowed to do this to another person or another family ever again.”
The Iraqi embassy in Canberra was contacted for comment.