Deportation as an limitless sentence.
Deportation as a prison.

The traditional prison has walls and deportation keeps them high. The effects of the uprooting on the expelled person are notorious. As though he or she was in prison, the deported person was as marginated as it was possibly made and the situation was the consequence of a cristal clear repressive intention.

The distance, at thousands of kilometers of the Basque Country, keeps the same effects of the prison. Deportation under these conditions was a sinonym of isolation and this is the first element of the design of a prison. Isolation is presented in different aspects, all of them bearing the same traumatic effects on the deported person, the same effects produced by the prison.

In the same situation as in other types of treatments, the deported person is deprived of his word and arguments. The prisoner, in general, is condemned to ostracism, and the internment makes him lose the active role played until his living conditions were changed. The deported person suffers the same punishment of the prisoner. He loses the access to the daily compromise of the fight to attain the objective of his militant attitude.

The deported, same as the prisoners, has no possibilities to influence the decissions affecting his private life or his political oppinions. He is in a state of absolute helplessness. His whole future is in the hands of the French and Spanish states, exactly the same as though he was kept in a prison.

But in the case of the deported persons, this helplesness is even made stronger from the juridical point of view. Without a trial, the deported has been sentenced not beeing able to make use of his right of defense. His or her situation was presented by the Spanish press with the typical intoxication exercise of the last days of the so called "democratic transition".

The juridical helplesness of the deported is, probably, one of the most remarkable facts when analysing their condition. Some of the deported, included in proceedings initiated by the Spanish "Audiencia Nacional" (a juridical organism inherited from Franco's times), have not been crudely persecuted in their sheltering countries, because the same Spanish judges considered sufficient punishment to keep them abroad. This idea has no juridical basis, but it is a "de facto" evidence.

"Nobody is guilty until he or she has been condemned", is one of the basic international rules. But in the cases of deportations there has been no condemned and automatically, the democratic application of the International Law was denied. The deported persons have been condemned by the press and two states which, theoretically, proclaim the independence and autonomy of their three powers: Juridical, Executive and Legislative.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises that all persons have the right to an impartial trial and that the xentence must be defined in time. Basque deportees have never had a trial and their sentence is unlimited in time, they have never known when it was going to be fulfilled and, naturally, they have had no right to the redemptions provided in the Penal Codes of the French or Spanish states. The Universal Declaration also states that all persons have the right to an identity. Basque deportees have had no juridical personality at all and in some countries, like Sao Tome or Cape Verde, they only existed "officially", They were not even registered as "persons".