Save Iñaki de Juana

This comes to us thanks to Euskal Diaspora:

The Basque political prisoner Iñaki de Juana Chaos began on August 7th a hunger strike to demand the respect to his constitutional right to be released from prison.

Iñaki of Juana should have left jail on October 25th 2004, after having completed his 18 years jail sentence. But the judge of the first penal instance of Spain's Audiencia Nacional, Gómez Bermúdez initiated on October 22nd, a process aimed at disallowing the reduction sentence claiming that the Basque political prisoner had worked, which resulted on a judiciary decision to extend de Juana's incarceration. Facing the impossibility to justify this decision, the judge asked then for the preventive detention against him for a presumed offense of adherence to armed organization and terrorist threats. In order to initiate this new procedure, the judge used as evidence two articles of opinion that Iñaki de Juana penned, same that were published by the newspaper Gara. It would be quite impossible to find in these articles sufficient legal weight to substantiate these accusations.

On June 14th 2006, a judicial ruling by judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain's Audiencia Nacional was published. According to this judge, within those afore mentioned articles, Iñaki de Juana expressed his support to the Movement of Basque National Liberation (MLNV), and that this movement "cannot be compared to ETA ". He added "that this movement had not been qualified as a terrorist organization" and therefore he considered that the accusation of issued threats was not proven. This unleashed a national media campaign against the judge's decision. The head of the Ministry of Justice, Juan Fernando López Aguilar declared: "We will fabricate new accusations to stop his release from jail". The head of the Fiscal Ministry, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, stated: "We will continue to oppose his release from jail within the frame of what is legally possible" after openly decrying judge Pedraz's decision. This situation pushed the section three of the penal instance of Spain's Audiencia Nacional to declare an annulment of the decision by judge Pedraz while considering that de Juana made "an open display" of his adherence to ETA in the published articles, citing that the content, according to the indictment "clearly reveals a possible terrorist threat ", requesting a new sentence of 96 years of jail.

One more time we witness a brutal initiative on behalf of the head of the Spanish government and the court known as the Audiencia Nacional, an institution that does not respect the most fundamental principles in Spain's body of laws, an institution with a declared goal, to ensure that not a single Basque political prisoner is released from jail even after having fulfilled the entirety of their jail sentences. The Spanish reasoning, based in pure political vengeance, is that Iñaki de Juana and other Basque political prisoners, didn't not serve their jail sentences in the time terms to which the courts had sentenced them. Thus, the government of Zapatero pretends to promote a situation of "life terms" against the collective of Basque political prisoners while violating the universal right to the release of those prisoners who have completed their jail terms. Even more, this situation takes place at a very politically sensitive moment, just when some possibilities of resolution of the conflict that has confronted the Basque people and the Spanish state for several decades opened up, a time in which the Spanish government attacks the most basic rights of the Basque political prisoners in order to make even more difficult the democratic resolution of the political conflict. In these circumstances, Iñaki decided that he didn't have any other way out than to begin an hunger strike, even though it could imply his death. We ask for your active solidarity with Iñaki and we issue a call to the international community to denounce the inconsistency of the facts on which this new accusation is based and to ask for his right to be liberated.

Let's save Iñaki´s life!!!

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