Dispossessed Couple Begin Hunger Strike

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Wednesday August 18 2010

A CANARIAN couple began an “indefinite” hunger strike outside Tenerife's Palace of Justice on Wednesday in a property dispute.

by JAMES TWEEDIE

Husband and wife José María Fernández Herrero and Esmerelda Delgado (pictured) from the island of El Hierro are protesting against a court ruling in March which deprived them of 350 square metres of the land on which their home is built.

The couple set up camp outside the court building on in Avenida Tres de Mayo in the provincial capital with nothing but sleeping bags, folding chairs and a banner on Tuesday August 17.

They announced their hunger strike, during which they will eat nothing and drink only water, at a press conference the next day.

Their banner read: “Against judicial defenselessness in El Hierro.”

The couple accuse lawyer Reyes Margarita Fernández Qunitero – a substitute judge who has nevertheless been in office for over four years, and who presided over the court case – of ruling against them in favour of their neighbour, who they claim is a personal friend of the judge.

Mr Fernández Herrero and Ms Delgado said that while they presented documents and witnesses to back their claim in the two year-long dispute, their neighbour only produced two witnesses: Her niece and a friend.

They claim that the judge treated the testimony of their witnesses with contempt while accepting that of their neighbours, and that they have been told that “nothing is known” of the whereabouts of the official recordings of the court proceedings.

Mr Fernández Herrero and Ms Delgado were given just six weeks to appeal before the ruling was ratified.

Ms Delgado said that the loss of property would oblige them to demolish one wall and a staircase of their home, rendering in “uninhabitable.”

Mr Fernández Herrero has just completed an eight-day, 321 kilometre march in mainland Spain in protest at the ruling.

He said that while he understood the consequences of his extreme course of action, but that he and his wife were “desperate” for justice.

Sahrawi human rights campaigner Aminatou Haidar was hospitalised after vomiting blood on the 31^st day of her hunger strike at Lanzarote airport in the eastern Canaries in November and December of 2009.

Provisional IRA member Bobby sands died after 66 days on hunger strike in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in 1981.

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