A mother-of-three with close family ties to Northern Ireland, has spoken of her family’s ‘devastation’ over her husband’s detention in Dubai where he has spent 17 years in jail over a business debt.
Heather Cornelius appealed to the Irish government to help release her husband from jail, where he is not due for release until 2038.
Mrs Cornelius, an Irish citizen with Belfast and Co Down roots who spent her formative years at school in Co Derry and then Ulster University, has turned to Dublin after claiming the UK Government has failed to help over the years since her husband Ryan was first imprisoned in 2008.
The now 71-year-old Mr Cornelius was first convicted on what his family say was a false charge of fraud connected to a $500m development deal in Dubai.
But then in 2018, as he was finishing his sentence, Mr Cornelius was told he had to serve a further 20 years under a controversial 2016 law allowing a creditor to keep a debtor in prison for failing to repay money owed.
A UN working group on arbitrary detention ruled in 2022 his trial was unfair, imprisonment unlawful, that he should be released immediately and compensated.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Embassy in Dublin was contacted for comment.
“We have missed so much time with him, our lives have been devastated and we just want him to come home and be with us,” Mrs Cornelius told The Irish News.
Their youngest child was just six when his father was first arrested. The three children from the 40-year marriage are adults now, aged between 23 and 34. They have only been able to visit on rare occasions.
Following his arrest, all the family’s substantial assets and cash disappeared while Mrs Cornelius had to continue to bring up three growing children, often with help from family and friends.
She said her husband has high blood pressure, several skin conditions, has contracted TB and Covid-19 several times while in jail.
“They want him to die there,” she said, adding the couple talk on the phone every and that is how they hold on to hope.
Mrs Cornelius, her brother-in-law Chris Pagett and Sir Bill Browder, the human rights campaigner and financier, met with TDs and senators at Leinster House on Thursday. Crucially, the delegation also had a sit down with a Middle East specialist at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).
“You have to recognise that Heather, an Irish citizen, is a victim here, that her family has been destroyed,” said Mr Pagett.
Mr Pagett believes this “travesty of justice” ultimately stems from Mr Cornelius making enemies within the Emirati hierarchy.
“This man should not have been in prison at all, but to serve 17 years and to have his entire life ruined over this thing, it’s just unfathomable,” Sir Bill told PA news.
Mrs Cornelius added her husband has said the Irish embassy in Abu Dhabi is “way more proactive with prisoners than anybody else”.
“They really are fantastic. We would just like to try and get some more people backing us and supporting us,” she said, adding that she believes one of the reasons London has not helped is because her husband is an “embarrassment”.
The delegation met Labour leader Ivana Bacik, Social Democrats TD Sinead Gibney, and Independent senators Aubrey McCarthy and Gerard Craughwell.
Following the meetings, Mrs Cornelius said “everybody was very receptive, they could hear the unjustness of this whole situation. It was very positive”.
Ms Cornelius’s parents, Martin Brown, from Belfast, and Mabel Blackmore, whose family were originally from the Dublin area, met and moved after marrying to Donaghadee, Co Down.
The couple moved to Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, where Heather was born in the early 1960s. She later returned to the north aged nine, for her education, went to Coleraine High and then on to study physiotherapy at Jordanstown.
Mr Browder said the British government has “basically been totally inactive” and that “anything is better than nothing”.
“Ryan is a British citizen, but the British government has pretty much left him to hang out and dry,” he told PA.
“Given that there’s a connection to Ireland, we thought that perhaps the Irish would care more about one of theirs than the British do about theirs.”