PETALING JAYA, July 21 — Lim Guan Eng today urged Putrajaya to abide by international laws in the treatment of prisoners, noting the concerns raised by S. Indra Devi over the health of her husband, Indian rights leader P. Uthayakumar.
Lim, a former detainee in the same Kajang prison where Uthayakumar is currently serving his sentence for sedition, said he empathises with the former Hindraf leader as he received the same treatment when he was locked up there in 1998.
He said in a statement here that he felt saddened when Indra Devi described her husband’s ailing health at a press conference yesterday and related his living conditions in the prison cell.
According to media reports, the aggrieved wife had said that Uthayakumar is suffering from prolapsed disc, a degenerative disc disease of the spinal lumbar, which causes severe back pains.
During the media conference, she alleged that despite recommendations from at least four doctors, prison officials have continued to deny Uthayakumar access to a pillow or even a chair, forcing him to sleep on a very thin foam mattress.
“This is familiar to what I had endured when I was imprisoned under the Sedition Act and the Printing Presses and Publications Act in 1998, when I initially did not even had a thin mattress but had to sleep on the cold cement floor,” Lim recalled.
The Penang chief minister urged the government to accede to Indra Devi’s request that her husband be sent to the hospital before he is stricken by paralysis, pointing out that the doctors there would know what medicine he needs.
“I will also be writing to the Home Ministry and the Prisons Department to ask for permission to meet him to hear out Uthayakumar’s medical complaint,” he said.
“Whatever political differences there is, our country should not lose one’s humanity by refusing medical treatment for political opponents,” he added.
Uthayakumar was slapped a two-year and six months jail sentence on June 5 this year for penning seditious remarks in a 2007 letter to former British prime minister Gordon Brown.
The former Internal Security Act (ISA) detainee’s jail sentence was meted just hours after his brother and fellow Indian rights activist P. Waythamoorthy was sworn in as Senator in the newly-formed Barisan Nasional (BN) government.
