Robert Pether came home from Iraq because his wife kept asking

Persistence can bring a man home without proving it was ever fair to hold him. At Dublin Airport on Monday, October 12, Robert Pether thanked the wife who never stopped asking, then refused to call his return justice. The 51-year-old Australian engineer was arrested in Baghdad on April 7, 2021, over a contract dispute on the headquarters of Iraq's central bank, and convicted of fraud. A UN working group called his detention arbitrary and cited "acts of torture and ill treatment." He left jail in June 2025, "hours away from death," but was barred from leaving Iraq until a court lifted the ban last week. His convictions, he says, have not been overturned.

All that time his wife, Desree, was raising their sons, Oscar and Flynn, in Ireland and asking. Australia says it raised the case with Iraq more than 200 times, but the family felt abandoned. So Desree turned to Ireland, where he isn't even a citizen. Fighting back tears at the airport, Pether said his boys "watched their mum fight every day to try and bring me home."

Luke 18:1He also spoke a parable to them that they must always pray, and not give up,

Jesus told a story about a woman like that, so his followers would "always pray, and not give up" . A widow, about as powerless as anyone in that world, keeps coming to a judge who fears neither God nor people. When he finally rules for her, it has nothing to do with whether she is right: she is wearing him out.

The judge gives in, and he is still a bad judge.

Pether insisted on the same thing in Dublin. "Coming home today should never be mistaken for that injustice somehow having been corrected," he said. "It wasn't. Not even close."

Luke 18:6-76The Lord said, "Listen to what the unrighteous judge says.7Won't God avenge his chosen ones, who are crying out to him day and night, and yet he exercises patience with them?

Jesus makes his listeners hear the judge's reason too (verse 6). If even that man gives way, won't God, who is nothing like him, bring justice to his people who cry out to him day and night? Pether's hope was smaller. Governments, he said, are "made up of people." Then: "Sometimes an individual deciding to care, to pick up a telephone, to keep asking a question or simply refusing to give up can change the course of somebody else's life."

The parable closes on a question: when Jesus comes back, will he find faith on the earth (verse 8)? He means people who keep coming. Desree did, and her husband says it "took an enormous toll on her too." It took her five years, officials from four countries and a pro-bono team to bring one man home from a contract dispute. Power that moves only for the tireless leaves behind every prisoner who has no one to keep coming.