The Italian justice definitively validated Wednesday, September 9 the prison isolation regime of Cesare Battisti against which the ex-far left activist sentenced in Italy to life imprisonment for four murders committed in the 70s had announced the day before to start a strike of hunger.
Cesare Battisti, 65, has been in solitary confinement, without contact or activity, since mid-January 2019 in the high security prison of Oristano, in Sardinia.
Read also: Italy: Cesare Battisti announces a hunger strike in prison
Believing that this high security regime has no justification for him, the facts for which he was convicted going back several decades, Cesare Battisti launched a legal battle to obtain a relaxation of his conditions of detention.
But the Italian Court of Cassation, the highest criminal court on the peninsula, upheld the 2019 Milan Court of Appeal ruling and dismissed the ex-activist, the agencies reported.
This decision comes the day after the publication of a letter from Cesare Battisti to his lawyer in which he announces to stop eating and to refuse medical care.
The Italian prison system divides prisoners into categories and some can only come into contact with prisoners of the same category.
Cesare Battisti is the only one in his category (AS2 classification for terrorist) in his prison, his lawyer Davide Steccanella told AFP.
"
He therefore only speaks with his guards and rarely with his family, Sardinia is far away, you have to take the plane,
" added his defender.
The writer, author of successful thrillers, also demands his transfer to a prison where he could more easily see his relatives.
A former far-left activist who took refuge in France for 15 years, then in Brazil, he was captured in January 2019 in Bolivia, after nearly 40 years on the run, and extradited to Italy.
A few weeks after his imprisonment, he had admitted before a magistrate, for the first time, his responsibility in the murders as well as the error of the armed struggle During his stay in France from 1990 to 2004, Cesare Battisti had benefited from the protection of Socialist president at the time, François Mitterrand, who had pledged not to extradite any far-left activist who agreed to give up the armed struggle.
But in 2004, the government of President Jacques Chirac decided to put an end to the "
Mitterrand jurisprudence
" and to extradite Battisti.
He then fled to Brazil under a false identity with, according to him, the help of the French secret services.