A FORMER member of the Italian terrorist group the Red Brigades has stopped eating and is being treated in a French prison hospital after the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered her extradition to Italy last month.
It emerged that the actress and film director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – sister of Mr Sarkozy's wife, Carla Bruni – visited Marina Petrella, 54, in Fresnes prison outside Paris, where she has stopped eating and is being treated for severe depression.
Petrella's doctors warned yesterday that she could die soon if she were not released from jail and transferred to "an appropriate specialist unit". She now weighs just 39kg (6st), having lost 20 per cent of her body weight since her arrest.
Reported to be eating less than one yoghurt every six days and a little water, Petrella is not claiming to be on hunger strike, and agreed to be placed on a drip on Friday evening.
On 3 June, Mr Sarkozy ordered the extradition of Petrella to Italy, where she was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in 1992 for her role in the murder of an Italian police inspector in Rome in 1981, attempted kidnapping, attempted murder, kidnapping a judge, armed theft and terrorist attacks.
His decision caused outrage among human rights activists and members of the left-wing opposition, who accused him of betraying the amnesty offered to ex-members of the far-left revolutionary Red Brigades members in 1985 by the then president, François Mitterrand.
Petrella appealed against the extradition order to France's highest appeal body, the Conseil d'Etat, which will deliver its decision in the autumn.
Last week the French Green party, the Human Rights League and other organisations launched a campaign for Petrella's release on humanitarian grounds, describing the current situation as "revolting, incomprehensible and incoherent".
Petrella's supporters stressed that Mr Sarkozy has said he is ready to offer asylum in France to Farc guerrillas, responsible for holding French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt hostage for six years, if they renounce violence in Colombia.
Petrella has lived in France legally under her own name since 1993. She married in France and bought a house near Paris, where she lived with her ten-year-old daughter.
Although Mr Sarkozy had described her crimes as "unacceptable", he accompanied the announcement of her extradition with a letter to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi asking him to help secure a pardon for her. However, the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, said earlier this month there would be no automatic pardon for Petrella, noting that she had been sentenced to jail for "numerous and extremely serious terrorist crimes" and had so far escaped justice.
Dozens of Red Brigades members fled to France in the 1980s to escape prosecution in Italy. The amnesty offered by Mr Mitterrand was first rescinded in 2002 with the extradition of Paolo Persichetti, who was sentenced to a 22-year prison term.
Sarkozy's reform plans scrape through parliament THE French parliament has backed President Nicolas Sarkozy's ambitious project to rewrite the country's constitution by just one vote yesterday at a special congress held in Versailles.
The razor-edge vote only just gave Mr Sarkozy the 60 per cent majority of the combined National Assembly and Senate he needed for the reform bill to pass.
Speaking from Dublin, where he was discussing the future of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, Mr Sarkozy, who had spent the days leading up to the vote on his mobile phone trying to persuade opposition MPs to support the measure, hailed the news as "a victory for French democracy".
Mr Sarkozy said the reforms would strengthen France's parliament. But his critics argued that he was turning the country into a "monocracy".
Robert Badinter, a Socialist senator and former justice minister, said the reforms would be the equivalent of crowning Mr Sarkozy king.
Observers agree that the reforms represent the biggest shake-up in the way France is governed since the constitution was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in 1958. Opponents say it will create a "hyperpresidency" which betrays the spirit of the original constitution.
The most controversial change is a reform allowing the president to address parliament directly once a year, opening the door to a US State of the Union-style address.
Such a thing has not been permitted since 1875 in an effort to keep the executive and legislative branches separate.
Other reforms include setting a two-term limit for presidents, giving parliament a veto over some presidential appointments, ending government control over parliament's committee system, allowing parliament to set its own agenda and ending the president's right of collective pardon.
