Óscar Elías Biscet González

Cuban doctor recently released from prison by that country's government. He was serving a 25-year sentence after being considered a threat to the state.

In 1985 he graduated in medicine, specializing in internal medicine. In 1986 he staged his first protest due to unpaid shifts that Cuban doctors are required to work; as a consequence he was professionally suspended from the National Hospital "Enrique Cabrera" for a period of one year.

Starting in 1987 he began the practice and teaching of medicine at the Maternal and Child Hospital 10 de Octubre in Havana. Toward the end of the 1980s, he began his civic activities protesting against abuses committed by his country's government. In 1994 a file was opened against him for "dangerousness."

In 1997, he founded the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights with the purpose of promoting the defense of human rights, taking as its basis the right to life, and which carries out its activities through nonviolent civil disobedience. That same year he conducted a study on the use of a specific drug in abortion practices, "Rivanol: A Method to Destroy Life," in which he describes the abortion methods commonly used in the Cuban health system and denounces that the Rivanol methodology was completed, if necessary, with the lack of assistance to the newborn in the event of the child being born alive. The study was published in April 1998 and officially delivered to the Cuban government, with a letter addressed to President Fidel Castro on June 9, 1998, in which he denounced the Cuban health system for these acts, being fired the following year from the national health system.

In 1999, after a hunger strike, he was sentenced to 3 years in prison for disturbing the peace, being classified by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. After his release in 2002, he was arrested one month later and, accused of being a threat to the state, sentenced to 25 years in prison. Since then he has been serving his sentence in Kilo 5 prison in Pinar del Rio.

In 2007 the United States Government awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Furthermore, in 2009 he was nominated for the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord.