‘A Human Being Feels They Are on a Precipice’

The Right to Hunger Strike

“…Retaliation and forceful repression are also common, even in liberal democratic states. In 2015, the Papua New Guinean authorities in charge of Australia’s offshore refugee processing center on Manus Island quashed a mass hunger strike and placed its leaders in solitary confinement (Boochani 2023).…”

“…Davis (2003, 77) described sexual abuse of incarcerated women as “an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls.” It still is, despite the passage of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (Kiebala 2022). Prisons, as the incarceration law and policy expert Armstrong (2014, 440) argue, are “rife with violence (by both inmates and correctional staff), inhumane and unconstitutional conditions, and failures to provide adequate medical and mental health services.” Refugees suffered deadly medical neglect in Australia’s offshore processing system (Boochani 2023). French prisons fail to provide for the mental healthcare of incarcerated people, who suffer among the highest rate of suicide in Europe (Fazel, Ramesh, and Hawton 2017).…”

“…Many live their incarceration as a kind of “social death” (Price 2015). “Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve,” Mandela (1994, 230) wrote about his experience at Robben Island, adding: “To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.” Staff often address incarcerated people by a number rather than by their name, which is but one aspect of the process of dehumanization that contributes to robbing them of a sense of self (Boochani 2023, 5–8).…”

“…Medical neglect has reached severe, even deadly, consequences in American migrant detention centers (DWN 2020), jails (Coll 2019), and penitentiaries (Miller 2021, chap. 6), as well as in European and Australian refugee camps (Boochani 2023; HRW 2020).…”

“…In Israel, carceral oppression is part and parcel of the state’s colonial occupation of the Palestinian Territories, to the point of blurring the line between carceral and political oppression, as Gaza’s description as “the world’s largest open-air prison” suggests. In Europe and Australia, restrictive immigration policies and populations’ callous disregard for asylum-seekers (especially racialized ones) underwrite carceral oppression in detention centers and refugee camps (Boochani 2019; 2023; Parekh 2016).…”