Injustice and Racism: The Tragic Death of Lamin Fatty in Vaud Police Custody

2024-01-15 19:24:45

Lamin Fatty died unjustly in the Vaud police premises from epilepsy. The case, entrusted to the Vaud prosecutor’s office, has just been closed. The dismissal order issued by Prosecutor Ximena Paola Manriquez was approved by the Central Public Prosecutor’s Office on November 15, 2023.

Lamin therefore died naturally, according to the Vaud Public Prosecutor’s Office. There is no one to pursue. Which amounts to saying that he might have died elsewhere without the existence of this situation. His life will have been worth only 800 francs: These 800 francs are the amount of the fine to which the military justice had condemned the border guards responsible for his arrest, for a “negligent non-observance of service requirements for having determined falsely identify the identity of a taxable person. Because it was from them that everything started, until his “arbitrary” incarceration and until his death.

Had it not been for this incarceration, Lamin Fatty, free to move around, would have been able to go to the hospital and be properly cared for without any suspicion of guilt being cast upon him, without the doctors had the pressure and the impression of treating a criminal. In reality, however, following the delicate head operation that Lamin had previously undergone, the doctors should have informed the police in one way or another that the latter was seriously ill and recovering.

Looking at the latest legal cases before the Vaud and Swiss courts linked to the problem of racism, a state of mind of institutional indifference and discrimination emerges. Despite protests and demonstrations, the facts demonstrate a deafness that is part of a continuity as in the paradox developed by Donald Goines in his thriller White Justice, Black Poverty. Likewise, despite the complaints and reports, the recent electoral campaign and the recent federal elections which followed saw the expression in Switzerland of an uninhibited racism in the face of which the judicial authorities suffer from blindness.

It is through these significant acts, which denote a certain impunity and a harmful ease, that the resurgence of the racist phenomenon is fueled and that it is possible to argue that we are faced with a privilege to produce a discourse and racist decisions.

Lamin Fatty would have been white, it seems obvious that the police would have acted meticulously, scrupulously carrying out the procedure, but that was not the case. Lamin Fatty had the wrong skin color, the one on which it is so easy to paint every imaginary form of illegality possible in this country. The police are not exempt from these prejudices when they are supposed to act once morest black people. This racist state of mind is perceptible to the point of leading to abuses like that suffered by Lamin Fatty.

It should also be added that stress – which Lamin Fatty probably experienced during his arrest and incarceration in a cramped room – can promote epileptic seizures for people suffering from this disease (Kotwas et al., 2017). . Since this possibility is open, saying that no one is responsible for the death of Lamin Fatty is not far from being an aberration.

Alain Tito Mabiala is a Congolese journalist and writer exiled in Switzerland.

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