Only two inmates at Corradino prisons were refusing food by this afternoon, in a protest over their situation, a spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs said.
A group of 31 prisoners had initially declared that they would resume a hunger strike this morning after they did not receive feedback from the authorities to various requests made last month. However only 12 did not accept food. By the afternoon that number had dropped to two.
A group of 18 prisoners staged a 24-hour long hunger strike on June 17 but suspended their actionn talks started with the Ministry for Home Affairs.
In a statement today, some of the prisoners said they have been behind bars without sentence for years, even after pleading guilty.
"We want the Maltese judiciary to give sentences within a reasonable amount of time, as stated by the European Union."
They insisted that all people under arrest should be interrogated only in the presence of a lawyer.
"And we want the Lawyers to do their job properly. Some lawyers do not attend court cases, do not help the prosecuted person and are there 'only on paper' to receive their money and forget about them."
"In addition, many immigrants are imprisoned for years without sentence or bail because they are not able to pay a lawyer. We would like the government to take care of this.
They said they would like the government to consider if the offender has criminal history. "Currently it happens only with the Maltese citizens only and doesn't ably to anyone outside of Malta whether it is an E.U. citizen or a member of a third country."
The prisoners claimed that sentences given to drug couriers in Malta are considered as the highest sentences in all of Europe and convicted people are given an additional fine that is not given in other European countries, which either they pay or have converted into a longer prisoner term - "like giving somebody two sentences in one case."
"The drug couriers are people in the biggest need of re-socialization and not only punishment, which should be undoubtedly imposed on the dealers, who run the entire Maltese drug business. Imprisoning the couriers and throwing away the key will change nothing, doing so to the dealers will. Otherwise the dealers will always find somebody else to be their courier. Most of those people have never before committed criminal offences and are unaware of the dangers it brings. Many of them are poor people and admit many charges only to ensure that they will be given a smaller sentence."
They said the most of the foreign people apart from the immigrants would like to be deported to their countries and wish for the fine to be removed from already gigantic sentences, because earning such amount of money during the sentence is impossible.
"We want to acknowledge that we are all human beings and wish to be treated as such. In other European countries most of the foreign prisoners would have already finished their sentences."
They said they would resume their hunger strike because the authorities had ignored their pleas.