CATALAN President Quim Torra has started a 48-hour fast in support of four political prisoners who are on hunger strike.
The president, who joined a growing list of political figures who have made similar gestures, said he was doing it to show his “solidarity, respect and admiration for the courage of those in prison on a hunger strike”.
Jordi Turull and Jordi Sànchez stopped taking food at Lledoners prison 10 days ago, protesting at Spain’s Constitutional Court blocking attempts to take their cases to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.
They were joined a few days later by former ministers Quim Forn and Josep Rull, who are entering the seventh day of their protest, known in Catalonia as vaga de fam.
The ECHR will only accept cases that have gone through a country’s own judicial system, but the prisoners claim the courts have put their cases in a drawer and forgotten about them, denying them the right to approach Europe.
Turull told Catalan newspaper El Nacional that he had discovered how he had not valued some things until he no longer had them: “Until you lose it, it’s not valued enough: every moment, every minute, everything you can decide to do.
“Often in the dining room, with the other prisoners with whom I share a table, we made jokes of who could be eating now in this or that restaurant, or just a good plate of what you eat at home.
“Now in my head I only think of calling home.”
Forn, a former interior minister, has been in pre-trial jail for more than a year. Sánchez has been locked up since October last year.
Rull and Turull, both former ministers, spent a month in jail in 2017, but were rearrested in March and have been in pre-trial detention since then.
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