Hundreds of inmates on hunger strike at Lebanon's Roumieh prison as amnesty law stalls

A hunger strike by inmates at Lebanon’s Roumieh prison has entered its third week in protest at the suspended implementation of an amnesty law.

About 400 mostly Islamist detainees at the prison — the country’s largest — have been on hunger strike since 12 September, an anonymous judicial official told AFP on 22 September, after Lebanon’s Constitutional Council suspended the law on 10 September following an appeal by the Free Patriotic Movement.

Parliament passed the law on 12 August, the first general amnesty since 1991, and President Joseph Aoun promulgated it on 4 September. It was intended to benefit thousands of prisoners and wanted people, many of them Islamists held for years, in some cases without trial. The Council is expected to announce its verdict next month.

The scale of the strike is disputed. The Committee of Prisoners’ Families says more than 400 inmates are refusing food and medicine, with more than 40 in critical condition, The National reported on 29 September. A judicial source disputed those figures, telling The National that “maybe only two or three” prisoners were on strike and that there was no death toll from it.

Lebanon’s prisons are severely overcrowded: the country’s National Human Rights Commission said last year the prison population had reached 300% of capacity, with more than 6,200 inmates by the end of March.