By Julia Bale
Amnesty International issued an urgent action demand last week on the case of Irish prisoner Roisin McAliskey.
McAliskey, seven months pregnant and in bad health, is being held in a British prison awaiting extradition proceedings by German authorities in connection with the 1996 IRA bombing of a British army base in Germany.
According to prison authorities, McAliskey will have to give birth in shackles.
McAliskey suffers from asthma, an eating disorder and is severely underweight. According to her solicitor, she weighs less than 41 kilos. Independent medical reports state that "her pregnancy is being complicated, not only by her digestive and muscular disorder and stress-related asthma, but also by her current prison conditions."
Classified as a "Special Category A" prisoner, McAliskey is strip-searched twice a day, as well as before and after visits — even though there is no chance of physical contact during visits. McAliskey is being denied adequate medical attention, and all reading material and is being forced to sleep with the lights on.
Not only will McAliskey be forced to wear handcuffs when giving birth, but as a remand prisoner she will have her child taken away from her within 24 hours of birth. If her relatives refuse to comply with this, her baby will be immediately handed over to the British Social Services.
McAliskey is no stranger to the consequences of British rule in Northern Ireland. She grew in the occupied North in the 1970s when riots and shootings were at their peak. Her mother, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a leading civil rights activist, was MP for Mid Ulster in the early '70s. Bernadette McAliskey was a speaker at the 1972 civil rights march in Derry, referred to as Bloody Sunday, where British troops shot dead 13 unarmed Irishmen. Having seen the killings first hand — and Britain's flat refusal to accept any responsibility — she pounced on British MP Reginald Maulding in the House of Commons, slapping him in the face after he made a joke about the deaths. Many believe the appalling treatment of Roisin McAliskey is in part, a belated retaliation for her mother's outburst.
German and British authorities recently confirmed their opposition to bail for McAliskey on the grounds that she is a "security risk". Yet the evidence linking her to the IRA attack consists only of an alleged identification by a German witness from a photograph forcibly taken of her while in prison, and two parts of finger-prints on a piece of cellophane wrapping from a cigarette packet which was supposedly found "in association" with a holiday home in Germany relating to the case.
Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams described Germany's opposition to bail for McAliskey as "cruel and vindictive" and has called for her immediate release.
Amnesty is appealing to all concerned individuals to write to British Home Secretary Michael Howard and demand an end to the "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including strip-searching" which McAliskey is experiencing. Her case is a serious breach of human rights. We must show that people will not accept this kind of treatment.
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