Hunger strike
A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance where participants fast as an act of political protest, usually with the objective of achieving a specific goal, such as a policy change.
[14] William Ball, a working class supporter of women's suffrage, was the subject of a pamphlet Torture in an English Prison not only due to the effects of force-feeding, but a cruel separation from family contact and mental health deterioration, secret transfer to a lunatic asylum and needed lifelong mental institutional care.
A few years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a group of American suffragettes led by Alice Paul engaged in a hunger strike and endured forced feedings while incarcerated at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia.
Fasting in order to bring attention to an injustice which one felt under his lord, and thus shame him, was a common feature of early Irish society and this tactic was fully incorporated into the Brehon legal system.
[17][18] Within the 20th century a total of 22 Irish republicans died on hunger strike with survivors suffering long-term health and psychological effects.
During the Anglo-Irish war, in October 1920, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died on hunger strike in Brixton prison.
Demanding reinstatement of political status and release from prison, nine men undertook a hunger strike at Cork County Gaol for 94 days, from August 11 to November 12, 1920.
[22] In February 1923, 23 women (members of Cumann na mBan) went on hunger strike for 34 days over the arrest and imprisonment without trial of Irish republican prisoners.
Under de Valera's first Fianna Fáil government in 1932, military pensions were awarded to dependants of republicans who died in 1920s hunger strikes on the same basis as those who were killed in action.
[25] During the state of emergency of World War II another De Valera government interned many IRA members, three of whom died on hunger strike: Sean McCaughey, Tony D'Arcy and Jack McNeela.
Frank Stagg, an IRA member being held in Wakefield Prison, died in 1976 after a 62-day hunger strike which he began as a campaign to be repatriated to Ireland.
[26][27] Members of other movements like Holger Meins of German Red Army Fraction used hunger strikes as a political weapon at this time.
After the deaths of the men and severe public disorder, the British Government granted partial concessions to the prisoners, and the strike was called off.
In addition to Gandhi, various others used the hunger strike option during the Indian independence movement, including Jatin Das, who fasted to death, and Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt in 1929[34] In 1952, in independent India, revolutionary Potti Sriramulu undertook a hunger strike for 56 days in an attempt to achieve the formation of a separate state, to be known as Andhra State.
[citation needed] Guillermo Fariñas did a seven-month hunger strike to protest against the extensive Internet censorship in Cuba.
In 2009, following the end of his 17-year imprisonment, Antúnez, his wife Iris, and Diosiris Santana Pérez started a hunger strike to support other political prisoners.
[38][39] On February 23, 2010, Orlando Zapata, a dissident arrested in 2003 as part of a crackdown on opposition groups, died in a hospital while undertaking a hunger strike that had been ongoing for 85 days.
[40] During pro-democracy demonstrations in 1990 youth activists carried out a hunger strike in Ulan Bator's central Sukhbaatar Square from March 7 onwards.
Timed to coincide with World Human Rights Day the protest brought much international attention to the plight of the refugees and their demand to be resettled, despite the Australian government initially refusing to acknowledge or comment on the matter.
[42] Article 8 of the 1975 World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo states that doctors are not allowed to force-feed hunger strikers.
The AMA has formally endorsed the WMA Declaration of Tokyo and has written several letters to the US government and made public statements in opposition to US physician involvement in force feeding of hunger strikers in contravention of medical ethics.
