The revolutionary Dimitris Koufontinas has been on hunger strike since January 8th, 2021. Since February 22nd he has also refused to take any liquids. He is in the intensive care unit of a detention hospital in central Greece and could die at any moment.
Dimitris Koufontinas was abducted without announcement from the agricultural prison where he was serving his sentence after a new law -specifically designed for him- which denies him the right to serve his sentence in an agricultural prison was passed in 2020. Instead of transferring him to Korudallos, the prison of his last residence, as the same law states, the government broke its own law by secretively transferring him to the high security prisons of Domokos. Furthermore, they illegally denied him the right to object to this decision by refusing to deliver him the official documents of the decision.
A hunger strike is one of the various means that prisoners can use in order to fight for their “rights”. When a state chooses to arbitrarily deprive the “legal rights” of prisoners, forcing them into further misery, repression and degradation, they can be faced with having to resort to a hunger strike. Prisoners use this method of protest to demand basic conditions of survival while incarcerated, without any exceptions regimes deem to impose on them. It is the culmination of their struggle when they choose to risk their body and their life in order to create pressure against any authority. Continue
