Son joins French couple's appeal for bail
Alan Schmidt and Laurence Liegeois, the French couple awaiting extradition to France after a court order last week, have filed an application before the Criminal Curt of Appeal requesting bail.
Attached to Mr Schmidt's application was a sworn declaration by Michael Schmidt, his son, requesting that his father be granted bail.
In the declaration Michael Schmidt alleges that on the night of February 5, his father seemed to have suffered a stroke and 'only just escaped death'. Still, the medical staff at Mt Carmel Hospital only attended to him several hours later and they claimed that what he had suffered was 'probably been the consequence of a mixture of Fanta and Sprite that Alan Schmidt drank in the night during a hypoglycaemic episode to get his sugar levels back to normal.'
He said his father also suffered severe diarrhoea all night but was left to cope with the situation in a dark cell alone, despite being 98 per cent blind.
The fact that he shared toilet facilities with another inmate left him 'exposed to his fellow inmate', stripping Alan Schmidt of all human dignity, his son said.
The couple filed an appeal from their extradition on Friday.
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lgalea
Feb 9th 2010, 13:59
A. Borg
So are we now going to start lumping criminals apart from illegal immigrants because their countries prisons are not up to our strandard?
A. Borg
Feb 8th 2010, 21:55
@Alfred Bugeja:
The french president himself called the state of french prisons "a shame of the nation";
Since 1996 France gets regularly slamed by the EU and human rights associations like amnesty international and human rights watch for the inhumane and degrading treatment in french prisons. According to the report of the commisioner of human rights of the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammerberg the situation in France is the worst in Europe: overpopupation in prisons up to 225 per cent of their capacity, highest number of suicides in prisons in Europe, insufficient medical treatment for prisoners, lack of hygiene, violence torture, prison riots ... .
Is this the example we are following? For sure we are still far away from french circumstances, but that doesn't mean that we can ignore someones fundamental rights?
Mr. Schmitt is a sick man, but imprisoned or not he has rights and his dignity should be respected even more so as he is not in a prison but in a maltese hospital. We should be careful not to come to a state like in France, where appearently the human rights of detainees are worth nothing.
T Camilleri
Feb 8th 2010, 18:08
When is this sick joke going to end by their deportation to face the criminal charges back in their own country? Or are we to believe that France is not a democratic country and its prisons are like the Guantanamo, the other secret CIA prisons and the ex-USSR gulags?
Alfred Bugeja
Feb 8th 2010, 16:35
Oh... Were I daydreaming or did Mr. Schmidt's lawyer describe Malta's prisons as a five-star hotel compared to prisons in France only last week? I guess this statement puts them as three-star prisons... or two-star considering you have to share a toilet with another inmate.