ISTANBUL (AP) — Ladies took to the streets of cities throughout Europe, Africa, South America and elsewhere to mark Worldwide Ladies’s Day with calls for for ending inequality and gender-based violence.
On the Asian aspect of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest metropolis, a rally in Kadikoy noticed members of dozens of ladies’s teams hearken to speeches, dance and sing within the spring sunshine. The colourful protest was overseen by a big police presence, together with officers in riot gear and a water cannon truck.
The federal government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared 2025 the 12 months of the Household. Protesters pushed again in opposition to the thought of ladies’s function being confined to marriage and motherhood, carrying banners studying “Household is not going to bind us to life” and “We is not going to be sacrificed to the household.”
Critics have accused the federal government of overseeing restrictions on girls’s rights and never doing sufficient to sort out violence in opposition to girls.
Erdogan in 2021 withdrew Turkey from a European treaty, dubbed the Istanbul Conference, that protects girls from home violence. Turkish rights group We Will Cease Femicides Platform says that 394 girls had been killed by males in 2024.
“There’s bullying at work, strain from husbands and fathers at dwelling and strain from patriarchal society. We demand that this strain be lowered even additional,” Yaz Gulgun, 52, mentioned.
Ladies throughout Europe and Africa march in opposition to discrimination
In lots of different European nations, girls additionally protested in opposition to violence, for higher entry to gender-specific well being care, equal pay and different points wherein they do not get the identical remedy as males.
In Poland, activists opened a middle throughout from the parliament constructing in Warsaw the place girls can go to have abortions with drugs, both alone or with different girls.
Opening the middle on Worldwide Ladies’s Day throughout from the legislature was a symbolic problem to authorities within the historically Roman Catholic nation, which has one in all Europe’s most restrictive abortion legal guidelines.
From Athens to Madrid, Paris, Munich, Zurich and Belgrade and in lots of extra cities throughout the continent, girls marched to demand an finish to remedy as second-class residents in society, politics, household and at work.
In Madrid, protesters held up huge hand-drawn photos depicting Gisele Pélicot, the lady who was drugged by her now ex-husband in France over the course of a decade in order that she could possibly be raped by dozens of males whereas unconscious. Pélicot has grow to be an emblem for ladies throughout Europe within the struggle in opposition to sexual violence.
1000’s of ladies marched within the capital Skopje and a number of other different cities in North Macedonia to boost their voices for financial, political and social equality for ladies.
Organizers mentioned solely about 28% of ladies within the nation personal property and in rural areas solely 5%, largely widows, have property of their title. Solely 18 out of 100 girls surveyed in rural areas responded that their dad and mom divided household property equally between the brother and sister. “The remaining had been gender discriminated in opposition to inside their household,” they mentioned.
In Nigeria’s capital, Lagos, hundreds of ladies gathered on the Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, dancing and signing and celebrating their womanhood. Many had been wearing purple — the normal shade of the ladies’s liberation motion.
In Russia, the ladies’s day celebrations had a extra official tone, with honor guard troopers presenting yellow tulips to women and girls throughout a celebration in St. Petersburg.
German president warns of backlash in opposition to progress already made
In Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier referred to as for stronger efforts to realize equality and warned in opposition to tendencies to roll again progress already made.
“Globally, we’re seeing populist events attempting to create the impression that equality is one thing like a hard and fast concept of progressive forces,” he mentioned. He gave an instance of ” massive tech firms which have lengthy prided themselves on their modernity and are actually, on the behest of a brand new American administration, organising variety packages and raving a couple of new ‘masculine power’ in firms and society.”
Marchers in South America denounce femicides
In South America, a few of the marches had been organized by teams protesting the killings of ladies generally known as femicides.
Tons of of ladies in Ecuador marched by the streets of Quito to regular drumbeats and held indicators that opposed violence and the “patriarchal system.”
“Justice for our daughters!” some demonstrators yelled in help of ladies slain lately.
In Bolivia, hundreds of ladies started marching late Friday, with some scrawling graffiti on the partitions of courthouses demanding that their rights be revered and denouncing impunity in femicides, with lower than half of these instances reaching a sentencing.
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Kirsten Grieshaber contributed to this report from Berlin.
