The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday ordered France to pay a former military chief of the ETA militant group €10,000 in compensation for failing to give adequate medical treatment.
Juan Ibon Fernández Iradi, a Spanish national, is serving a 30-year jail term for shooting a gendarme but has been suffering from multiple sclerosis that was diagnosed in 2011.
His lawyers argued that after the diagnosis, Fernández Iradi’s care was late and inadequate, particularly the psychological support, specialist consultations, physiotherapy and other treatment.
Now aged 54, he had sought €100,000 in damages but the Strasbourg-based court awarded him €10,000 with €11,840 in legal fees.
Fernández Iradi was first detained in 2002, a year after a French gendarme was wounded while making a routine traffic check.
Between 2008 and 2009, French courts jailed him for prison terms of 30, 15 and 30 years on various terrorism charges. In 2012 his sentences were reduced to the statutory maximum of 30 years in jail. He is currently detained in San Sebastian in Spain’s Basque region.
ETA, which had sought independence for the Basque region straddling Spain and France, was blamed for more than 850 deaths during its years of operation between 1959 and its dissolution in 2018.
