Mumia’s fight for medical treatment

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Below are excerpts from a report by attorney Rachel Wolkenstein on the fight of Mumia Abu-Jamal to obtain necessary medical treatment. Mumia, a noted political commentator and innocent political prisoner, was con­ victed in 1982 of killing a Philadelphia police officer. He received the death penalty, a sentence that was later re­ duced to life imprisonment without parole. A in Mumia Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes took place over three remarkable and legally historic evidentiary hearing days in late December 2015 in the U.S. federal district court in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The amended lawsuit filed Aug. 3, 2015, by attorneys Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Project and Robert Boyle is an action for damages, injunctive relief and a declaration of the unconstitutional denial of medical treatment to Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The immediate question is whether Judge Robert Mar­ iani will grant Mumia a preliminary injunction and rule ...Refugees (continued from page 1: “U.S., European authorities clamp down on refugees”)

that has left thousands stranded in Greece.

Although Germany and Sweden have the most generous policies, they are currently granting refugees no more than a temporary stay of one to three years, while implementing ID checks on trains and tighter regulations for bring­ ing family members. Authorities say the new regulations are necessary for security and to stem a flow of arrivals that was “unsustainable.” Sound famil­ iar? Similar proposals and policies have been either proposed or put in place to “stem the flow” of illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States in recent decades.

In the meantime, conditions in ref­ ugee camps are often appalling. In Grande-Synthe, a refugee camp that is home to over 2500 occupants, there are only two drinking water stations and one chemical toilet per 100 occupants.

This has led to a sanitation crisis that has caused dozens of small children to become ill. Occupants live in thin tents surrounded by mud, in areas that regu­ larly flood.

“Is there any hope the UK will take us? I just want to tell my children there is hope for them,” said Gona Ahmed, a Kurdish woman from Iraq who is living 4 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2016 alone in the Grande-Synthe camp with her four children, in a recent interview with the Independent. Her husband was wounded fighting when ISIS invaded their village.

And racism is well and alive in the receiving countries as well. In recent French regional elections, the far-right, anti-immigrant Front National got 43% of the vote in Grande-Synthe. U.S. to deport immigrants At the same time, the immigration crisis continues in the United States as well, where authorities have outlined plans to deport numbers of recently ar­ rived Central American families starting this month. According to the Washing­ ton Post, the raids began on New Year’s weekend, when ICE apprehended 121 adults and children in a series of raids that took place in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. This mass deportation could affect over 100,000 families who fled violence in their home countries but were denied asylum in the U.S.

In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Gillian Christensen, press secretary to Immigration Control and Enforcement, said that ICE has priori­ tized decorations to people who “pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 134,000 migrants from Central America in FY 2015, as the demograph­ that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has been deliberately indifferent to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s medical condition in violation of the Eighth Amend­ ment’s proscription against cruel and unusual punish­ ment and order the DOC to immediately treat Mumia’s active Hepatitis-C with the new antiviral medications.

The legal brief filed Aug. 17, 2015, in support of the Motion for Preliminary Injunction succinctly summa­ rizes Mumia’s case: “Mumia Abu-Jamal is suffering se­ vere and chronic symptoms from untreated, active Hep­ atitis-C. In the past several months he has experienced diabetic shock, a painful and pruritic [extremely itchy] rash affecting his entire body, edema, skin lesions, ane­ mia, and likely fibrosis of the liver.

“Scientific advances in the treatment of Hepatitis-C have established a new standard of care that could cure Abu-Jamal of his Hepatitis-C and alleviate the painful symptoms within 8-12 weeks without significant side effects through daily administration of a single pill. DOC defendants, however, are refusing to provide Abu-Jamal with this medically necessary, life-saving treatment.”

Tics of the migrants arriving are chang­ ing.

And yet these policies are nothing new. Following World War II, the United States deported over a million Mexican migrants who were no longer needed as field hands in the Bracero Program when farming techniques became more mechanized.

This illustrates the way that the U.S. government has continued to use fear of imprisonment and mass deportation as a way to control the most oppressed section of the working class (undocu­ mented immigrants) and prevent them from rising up to defend their rights as workers and as human beings. As long as the immigrant population is kept afraid and at odds with the majority of the working class, it is easy to force them to work under the table for sub­ standard wages and in terrible working conditions.

And it seems as if Europe is following suit in the face of the ongoing refugee crisis. Capitalism creates a paradox by encouraging the free flow of money and goods across international borders, while at the same time heavily restrict­ ing the flow of people. As borders be­ come increasingly closed, it will only force more people to cross illegally and at more dangerous locations. This same phenomena occurred in the United States, when a longer wall and an in­ creasing Border Patrol presence along