David Martin, MEP

Miami Five Campaign comes to Strasbourg

Last week David had a meeting in Strasbourg with Olga Salanueva and Adriana Perez who were visiting the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Olga and Adriana were gathering support for their appeal to the US authorities to grant them visas to visit their husbands in US jails. Both women have been denied visas on ten separate occasions and in the case of Olga Salanueva told never to apply again.

The women’s husbands, Rene Gonzalez and Gerardo Hernandez, are two of five Cubans, known in the UK as the Miami 5, arrested and jailed for spying by in the US in 1998.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions has declared the detention of these five Cubans to be both illegal and arbitrary in May 2005, and Amnesty International has expressed “grave concern” at both the impartiality of the judicial process in the original trial and the denial of visas to these two wives.

David signed the European Parliament declaration 0089/2006, “On the refusal of the American authorities to grant visas to the families of detainees” in 2007 and the Amicus Brief to the US Supreme Court in January 2009 calling for a retrial for the five men.

The declaration specifically referred to the case of Cuban nationals Adriana Perez who has not seen her husband, Gerardo Hernandez, since he was arrested in 1998 and Olga Salanueva, the wife of Rene Gonzalez who has not seen her husband since 2000.

Unite the Union, the TUC and British trade unions have been supporting this case for the last five years and it is hoped that with the publication of the Amnesty International 22 page report on 13 October we are getting closer to achieving justice for the Miami 5 and their wives.

Further Background: http://www.cuba-solidarity.org.uk/miami5/

Picture shows David, Olga Salanueva, Adriana Perez and Peter Skinner meeting in Strasbourg