Hunger strike against discrimination and segregation in Italy

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This is a statement and press release by five Italian citizens who on Monday 14 February began a hunger strike to demand the end of discrimination in Italy – where highly authoritarian policies that discriminate against the “unvaccinated” are in place. Below we publish a statement of their reasons for beginning the hunger strike, and below that, their full press release. We implore you to reshare this article with friends, your political representatives and your media contacts.

“We announce the start of a hunger strike.

This act wants to express an absolute NO to policies that – to cover serious omissions, delays, inadequacies and contradictions – do not hesitate to punish citizens who have not broken any law or regulation, subverting the cultural principles, even before the legal ones, of the liberal state and of law.

The hunger strike is a definitive NO to an authoritarian system which, while exploiting and distorting the pandemic reality every day, does not seem to acknowledge the need of mending the tragic lacerations inflicted to the social fabric, nor does it seem to grasp the urgency to totally and definitely remove the segregation regime to which a part of the population is forced. This includes hundreds of thousands of adolescents and minors – the same ones whose growing psychiatric emergency are spent floods of words on, but who in fact are deprived of any voice, care and protection.

Fasting is also a form of sharing in the privations imposed on millions of people of all ages who, by government decree – and with the approval or silence of consultants, guarantors, scientists, magistrates and commentators – find themselves excluded from social life, from the right to work, from the constitutional freedom of movement, from the most varied opportunities for training and well-being. A sub-population of sub-humans, condemned in fact to non-existence, as expressed by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella who by saying “I leave a united country” actually said a true thing, as long as we exclude from the very idea of citizenship millions of citizens, separated to the point of not even being perceived, except to be discriminated against, intimidated and humiliated. United is only the part of the country that “exists” – then there are the “non-people”, invisible, unnamable, non-existent shadows, their stories, their children.

No such violence by the state against its citizens is remembered in living memory in the Italian Republic. However, there are persistent signs of a political course that tends to install this form of authoritarianism permanently at the very heart of the “operating system” that oversees the relationship between state and citizen: in several circles, these days, the extension is under discussion of the current forms of discrimination in the enjoyment of elementary rights even beyond the duration of the formal state of emergency and even in the absence of an actual emergency. It is the last step: the normalization of the inconceivable.

If this situation can only arouse the most irreducible political opposition and the strongest concern for the future of democracy, the thought of the hundreds of thousands of adolescents and very young people excluded with unprecedented and senseless brutality from essential aspects of their existence is a cause of unbearable suffering. Abstention from food is, again, a gesture of lucidity and personal awareness, carried out through silence and subtraction: removal from an unrecognizable, unacceptable time, in which political power is allowed to manifest itself with this degree of threatening, vindictive, paternalistic and irrational face. Where the progressive and egalitarian forces of society, and the institutional systems of control and guarantee, seem to have abdicated their role.

Our hunger strike does not convey any request or demand, other than that of totally and unconditionally removing, in principle, all forms of discrimination. The arguments have already been widely posed and today, after a dizzying escalation in the scale of discrimination, mass segregation seems to be accepted as normal. Therefore, we only have to present to the consciences of Italians and international observers a fact: bodies that voluntarily deprive themselves of their livelihood to express solidarity with the invisible bodies of the removed women, of the removed men, and of their children, all deprived of rights, livelihood, citizenship, dignity and future.”

Licia Coppo

Carlo Cuppini

Antonella Marsilia

Paola Olivieri

Sergio Porta

Donatella Campai

Alberto Cantoni

Here is the group’s press release which we encourage you to share and reprint:

While an increasingly large number of authoritative scientists declare that the adoption of green pass policies has no health nor scientific value, and while these are lifted throughout Europe, these days the Italian government is imposing a definitive escalation towards levels of discrimination of entire categories of citizens without equal in the world. From 10 January, this entails the exclusion from social life of a part of the population that includes even our children.

Today we are witnessing millions of people – including hundreds of thousands of adolescents and minors – who find themselves excluded from the most basic constitutional rights. These rights, let’s just mention the right to work and therefore to sustain oneself and one’s family, are essential to guarantee the dignity of the human person.

Never before in the history of the Italian Republic has the country’s government hit citizens so hard, every day exploiting and distorting both the pandemic reality and that of science. The social fabric of the country is upset and torn apart as never before in living memory, and the very foundations of the rule of law, the Constitution and democracy are seriously jeopardized.

This condition has raised the concern of Amnesty International, which has urged Italy not to use the green pass for discriminatory purposes – which in all evidence, according to Amnesty, it is doing.

The same request has been formally made by the Guarantor for Childhood of the Tuscany Region, in relation to the condition of millions of children and adolescents, tragically affected by these regulations.

And the same Undersecretaries for Education, Rossano Sasso and Barbara Floridia, defined the rules governing quarantine in the primary cycle of public schools as discriminatory, since they make distinction – without any recognizable scientific criteria – between vaccinated and unvaccinated pupils.

Inalienable rights have become conditional and differentiated concessions. By the very nature of green passes, the modulation of discrimination is extremely flexible. This is why yesterday’s saved people are today’s punished, and tomorrow others will be hit according to the agendas of the government in office. Nobody can feel safe.

Dozens of people across the country have been on hunger strike for some weeks now, as a spontaneous and urgent protest dictated by a definitive rejection both of these authoritarian policies and of the devastating climate of intolerance that has been created in Italy and feeds a very serious social division. Many other people are preparing to make similar decisions.

We ask political forces, institutions, guarantors, associations for the protection of human rights – and particularly for the protection of minors – to acknowledge that this strategy cannot and must not be the way out of the crisis.

We ask the Government and Parliament to remove immediately, permanently and in principle, any form of green pass and with this any form of discrimination between citizens.

We also turn to the international media and observers, to ask for their attention towards a political drift that has been going on for months and has now reached well beyond the point of no return, which is an absolute anomaly in the European context and should arouse the greatest concern in anyone who holds dear the values of liberal democracy.