What should happen about the hunger strikers?

[noblegiraffe]

There are a group of people currently on remand in prison awaiting trial for criminal activities taken in support of the (currently) proscribed terrorist group Palestine Action. Some of them have gone on hunger strike and are suffering health impacts and some have been hospitalised.

Their demands appear to be:
to be released on bail
for Palestine Action to be de-proscribed as a terrorist group
for the UK to stop selling arms to Israel

I'm seeing various MPs writing earnest letters to David Lammy as Justice Secretary, saying that he must meet with them urgently to discuss their demands.

And then what?

It should go without saying that I really don't want people to die, and I'm sure that their families must be frantic, but what is actually expected to happen here? The proscription of Palestine Action is being appealed in the courts and I don't think people threatening to kill themselves should impact the democratic process.

Being released on bail? While I agree that it is shocking that they have been held in prison for 2 years while awaiting trial, because the justice system should work faster than that, they are active members of a currently proscribed terrorist organisation. At least one of the hunger strikers took part in the attack on Elbit where a female police officer had her back broken by one of the activists who attacked her with a sledgehammer while she lay on the ground. There's plenty of video footage of this, and I don't think the hunger strikers have condemned it. If they did get bail by threatening to kill themselves, surely everyone would then give it a go?

So what should happen?

We shouldn’t be doing anything. Their choice, let them be.

They wont starve to death because they are fasting in shifts.One half of the group dont eat for 8 hours,while the other half eat then vise versa.Its a ridiculous publicity stunt and people would fo well to ignore the entitled brats..

Why are they being hospitalised then?

There were calls amongst the republican movement to end the strike, but seniors said no.. they wanted to continue... and like you said.. it's rare people can name the other 9

So they’re basically doing a 16-8 fast? 😆. I do an 18-6 fast nearly every day.

Sky news does make it seem more serious than that in fairness.

Speaking from the east side of the sea, I don't think the deaths really helped the cause. At that point the IRA hadn't yet learned quite how resistant to their own history the English are and how to use that against them most effectively..

The IRA used the English resistance to their own history against them effectively? LOL, what a weird way of saying bombing shopping centres, offices and post boxes.

Nothing should happen.

If they’re choosing to starve themselves to death, that is their choice and we shouldn’t force treatment on them, as Thatcher would say.

I am saying that the public bombing campaign did not shift the dial one iota to their aim. Which (had they actually studied their enemy) they should have known would be the case. I mean how many tens of thousands of people were killed in German bombing ? And not once was there ever a serious suggestion we should give in to them.

Would that count as aiding and abetting a suicide of someone under your care though ? (Maybe a more legal question ....)

I mean so much of it doesn’t ring true.

One is a type 1 diabetic, I’m also a t1, if he really was starving himself and being withheld meds as Sultana claims (I mean there are 1000 sensible reasons to deny an inmate needles and a fatal-in-small-doses medicine but let’s overlook those), he would very likely be dead after 2 weeks, let alone 4. If I stopped eating and stopped taking insulin I really would have about a week to live I think, if I wasn’t in a coma and very close to death.

I cannot emphasise just how lethal a combination of type 1 diabetes and not eating is, I know for sure he must be eating because if he wasn’t he would no longer be on this earth frankly.

Not if they hold mental capacity I think? You can’t force them to eat?

There’s no such charge as aiding and abetting suicide.

The Fairford Five was a group of five British protesters (Paul Milling, Margaret Jones, Phil Pritchard, Toby Olditch and Josh Richards) who broke into the RAF Fairford military air base in 2003 and disabled equipment in order to disrupt military operations at the start of the second Iraq war. The group was given its name by supporters and by articles in the press reporting on the event and the judicial trials which followed. Two of the defendants (Olditch and Prichard) were acquitted in May 2007 after the jury accepted that their actions were reasonable in the context of trying to prevent war crimes. Keir Starmer was on one of the defendant’s barrister teams.

True. But they are supposedly under the care of the state, in the shape of the prison. That brings in phrases such as "duty of care". If the state does nothing, it could be argued it has abandoned it's duty of care to ensure the safety of it's charges. And also by doing nothing when death is a clearly foreseen outcome of the prisoners actions, they are potentially acting to assist in suicide.

Not being a lawyer - not even playing one in a radio play - I can only ask these questions. I have no answer (but would be curious).

What war crimes were prevented by vandalising two planes that were incapable of refuelling Israeli bombers?

UK prison health care policy and international medical ethics (like the World Medical Association’s Declaration on hunger strikers) treat force-feeding as ethically unacceptable and akin to inhumane treatment unless the person lacks capacity or there is a court order authorising intervention. Prisoners can refuse food, and authorities typically monitor and support them medically rather than forcibly feed them; compulsory feeding without consent would require specific legal sanction (for example via court order) and is not a standard lawful practice simply because someone is on hunger strike.

AS I have just explained, I am not a lawyer. However there most certainly is a crime in helping someone end their life.

They don't deserve support, whatever their age. They can stop their own half baked starvation at any time they choose.
AFAIK they have food every other day so not truly a hunger strike. Happy to be corrected if this isn't the case.

Fuck me, NOBODY is gonna die from not eating for 8 hours 😂

They're not ‘helping them end their life’. They will have been offered food and treatment, which they will have declined/accepted as the whimsy takes them from the sound of it.

If the prison had withheld food and medical care when requested, that could amount to a crime.

But that’s not what is happening here.

Sounds like rather extreme intermittent fasting then.

I mean I do this every night when I’m asleep and somehow I’m still here! It’s a miracle

The UN has been clear that the mass bombings of civilians in occupied Palestine is genocide. Genocide is defined and criminalised under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which establishes genocide as an international crime under international law. It is prosecuted as a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court 1988, Article 6.