Vegan Prisoner Osman Evcan on 5th Hunger Strike

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Having gone on hunger strike for four times before for vegan food rights and having managed to add vegan-vegetarian food article to the Food Regulation for Convicted and Imprisoned in 2012, Osman Evcan has announced that he has been on hunger strike again since March 26.

The attorney of Evcan has stated that the primary request of Evcan, who got poisoned by the vegan food brought to him in October 2017, is that an investigation be launched into this poisoning incident.

According to his attorney, after getting food poisoning in October 2017, Evcan stopped to eat prison food and started to eat the meals that he could cook with the tea-urn in his solitary prison cell. Having started to eat the prison food again in late February 2018, Evcan had severe stomach aches.

Speaking to bianet about the condition of Evcan, his attorney said,

"The food in prisons is normally distributed in containers; but since Osman Evcan is vegan, his food is separately brought in table d'hote. Evcan is of the opinion that his food, which is brought to him from the open prison, is mixed with other substances on its way to him. For this reason, we demanded that the camera recordings be examined, but they told us that the related records have been deleted."

Being sentenced to life imprisonment in 1992, Evcan is expected to be released from prison in 2022 when his disciplinary punishments are not taken into account. However, the attorneys of Evcan stated that he was given "far too numerous" disciplinary punishments and each hunger strike resulted in yet another disciplinary punishment.

He protested Eid El-Adha; they started to put meat in his food

In his letter to the Freedom to the Earth Association, Osman Evcan stated that since 2017, when he announced that he protested against the Eid El-Adha, he was sometimes served meals with meat and sometimes unidentifiable meals resembling dishwater. Evcan also wrote that he was subjected to the verbal harassment of the prison guards due to his atheism and veganism.

Evcan resisted, the food regulation changed

Osman Evcan, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1992, went on a 43-day hunger strike in 2011 and managed to win vegan-vegetarian food rights for all convicted and imprisoned people who are vegan-vegetarian, leading to a change in the Food Regulation for Convicted and Imprisoned in 2012. (ÇT/SD)