To mark this occasion, every year the Government of Catalonia, the Provincial Councils of Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona, Barcelona City Council, the Federation of Municipalities of Catalonia, the Catalan Association of Municipalities, the Association of Microvillages of Catalonia and the Delegation of the Government of Spain to Catalonia agree on a manifesto to mark this date and everything it represents.
Official reading of the manifesto
An institutional ceremony will take place in Plaça de Sant Jaume on 25 November, at 9 am when the manifesto will be read out in public to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
The ceremony will begin with a minute’s silence in memory of all the women murdered by gender violence, followed by the reading of the manifesto by actor Maria Molins, and will conclude with the recital of a poem by poet Isa García Caparrós.
A date for standing up and for remembering
25 November was declared International Day for the Elimination of Violence towards Women during the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter held in Bogotá (Colombia) in 1981. The women taking part in the meeting denounced gender violence in the domestic sphere and rape and sexual harassment at a government level, including the torture and abuse suffered by many political prisoners.
This day was chosen to mark the violent assassination of the three sisters Minerva, Patria and Maria Teresa Mirabal, political activists murdered by dictator Rafael Trujillo’s secret police in the Dominican Republic when they were on their way to Puerto Plata to visit their husbands in prison on 25 November 1960. Their mangled bodies appeared in a mountain gully.
Adela (‘Dedé’) Mirabal was the only sister to survive, dying in Belgium in 2014 at the age of 88. These women have historically symbolised struggle and resistance for the popular feminist movement in the Dominican Republic. The UN made the date official in 1999.
