Three hundred and thirty-three political prisoners are today detained in Algerian prisons. They had the misfortune to participate in the Hirak movement. About forty of these prisoners of conscience are said to have started a hunger strike since January 28 in El Harrach prison in Algiers. This is what Algerian lawyers and media say. The Algiers Public Prosecutor’s Office denies these announcements.
Forty detainees are said to have started a hunger strike in El Harrach prison on Friday 28 January. It was the lawyer and member of the Collective for the Defense of Prisoners of Opinion, Abdelghani Badie, who made the announcement on the set of Berbère Television this Thursday, January 27. He claimed that ” this action coincided with the 64th anniversary of the eight-day strike in 1957 (ed. led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) for the independence of Algeria), and was aimed at protesting against the article 87 bis on the basis of which they are accused of terrorism.”
Several lawyers and human rights activists confirmed the start of this action of the hunger strike the next day, Friday, January 28, according to the news site Le Matin d ‘Algeria.
Denounce the systematization of pre-trial detention
Since the beginning of the year, more than thirty Algerians close to Hirak have been placed under judicial control or in pre-trial detention, reports the media Le Matin d’Algérie. The procedure, which aims at the imprisonment of a person before his trial, has become the rule in the prison of El Harrach.
By going on a hunger strike, they, therefore, denounce the systematization of this logic of incarceration. They denounce the living conditions in detention. They have been subjected for two years, like the other prisoners, to a double penalty, by depriving them of family visits and packed lunches made by the families, according to the media Le Matin d’Algérie. If there has been a resumption for a year of family visits, the ban on the basket is still in place.
Chain arrests denounced by associations
Many would-be detained since the Hirak revolution. A symbolic period of Algerian independence, the month of February 2019 marked the start of a series of demonstrations against the power of Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria, Algerian president from 1999 to 2019.
In addition to the thirty new detainees in 2022 mentioned above, the Committee for the Release of Detainees (CNLD) has identified no less than 333 prisoners of conscience in recent days. The human rights organization has been updating its Facebook page every day for the past two years with the full list of detainees and the sentences for each of them.
The latest is none other than rapper Bilal Hemila. He was arrested on Thursday and transferred to Tébessa in Algiers on Monday, January 30. He is released and will be auditioned on January 31. Faced with these accusations, the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Algiers denies any assertion.
The Algiers Public Prosecutor’s Office denies
In a column published Monday, January 30 in the same newspaper, two days after the announcement of the hunger strike, the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Algiers refutes this information. He denies both the hunger strike and the number of prisoners of conscience identified. The prosecution judges these statements as ” biased”, insofar as “no-strike movement” has been recorded within the penitentiary establishment of El Harrach, notes the news site Le Matin d’Algérie.
She even goes further. The Algiers court warns that it ” could incur the criminal liability of its authors insofar as information of this nature is intended to negatively impact public order and institutions”, thus directly targeting the Collective for the Defense of Convicted Prisoners and the newspaper Le Matin d’Algérie. This independent news site replaces the daily Le Matin, which was closed in 2004 by the Algerian authorities.
It is difficult to say with certainty whether these detainees have indeed started a hunger strike. Still, it wouldn’t be the first. Twenty-three prisoners of conscience, imprisoned after a march by the anti-regime Hirak movement last March, had also started a hunger strike, according to the associations.
