Cesare Battisti, a former far-left activist sentenced to life in Italy for four homicides during the 1970s, has started a new hunger strike to protest his isolation in a prison in Calabria (south), said Thursday (June 3rd). to AFP his daughter Valentine.
"
I am starting a hunger and medical strike from June 2,
" wrote Cesare Battisti, 66, who describes his high security section of Rossano prison as a "
grave
", in a text sent by his girl.
Read also: Relatives of Cesare Battisti denounce "
torture
" of isolation
After his extradition to Italy, the former head of the armed proletarians for communism was imprisoned in January 2019 in the high security prison of Oristano, in Sardinia, where he was serving his sentence under a strict isolation regime reserved for detainees. convicted of terrorism. On September 8, 2020, he announced, via his lawyer, to start a hunger strike to be closer to his family. Four days later, he was transferred to Rossano prison in Calabria, where there are prisoners convicted of Islamist terrorism. His daughter Valentine points out that all his transfer attempts to stop an isolation "
which has now lasted for 28 months
" have been systematically rejected.
“
I spent 40 years in exile leading a life as a taxpayer, fully integrated into civil society at the cost of incessant professional activity, peaceful involvement in cultural initiatives and volunteering, wherever we are. offered me refuge,
”said Cesare Battisti in his letter. Refugee in France for 15 years, then in Brazil, he was arrested 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 his responsibility for the murders for which he had been convicted and for which he had hitherto claimed his innocence.
During his stay in France from 1990 to 2004, Cesare Battisti had benefited from the protection of the socialist president of the time, François Mitterrand, who had pledged not to extradite any far left activist agreeing 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 had then fled to Brazil under a false identity. Until his confession, he had received the support of a large part of intellectual circles in France, where he had published a dozen detective stories with a strong autobiographical content.