Women’s Day in the world, with the best photos of 8M

From demands for constitutional rights in Islamabad to calls for economic parity in Manila, Paris and Madrid, the Demonstrations for International Women’s Day held on wednesday in cities around the world highlighted the unfinished business of providing equality half the population of the planet.

While activists on some sides hailed political and legal progress, they also pointed to the repression in countries like Afghanistan and Iran, and the large numbers of women and girls who experience sexual assault and domestic violence around the world.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, pointed out this week that women’s rights are subject to “abuses, threats and violations” throughout the world and that, at the current rate, gender equality will not be achieved in 300 years.

The progress made in decades is slipping away because “the patriarchy is fighting back,” Guterres said.

Even in countries where women enjoy considerable freedom, there have been recent setbacks. This has been the first International Women’s Day since the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion last year and many states adopted restrictions on it.

The United Nations recognized International Women’s Day in 1977, but the event has its roots in the labor movements of the early 20th century. The day is commemorated in different ways and to varying degrees in different countries around the world.

The UN has called Afghanistan the world‘s most repressive country for women and girls since the Taliban seized power in 2021. The UN mission to the country said Afghanistan’s new rulers were “imposing rules that leave most of the women and girls virtually trapped in their homes.”

They have prohibited the education of girls beyond the sixth grade, and have banned women from public spaces such as parks and gyms. Women must cover themselves from head to toe, and are also prohibited from working for national and international non-governmental organizations.

Zubaida Akbar, an Afghan women’s rights defender, told the UN Security Council that the country’s women and girls face “the worst crisis of women’s rights in the world.”

“The Taliban have not only tried to erase women from public life, they have also extinguished our basic humanity,” Zubaida declared. “There is a term that aptly describes the situation of Afghan women today: gender apartheid.”

Women gathered in Pakistan’s major cities to march amid a heavy security force presence. The organizers said that the objective of the demonstrations was to demand the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Last year, some conservative groups threatened to forcibly prevent similar marches.

In Japan, women’s rights activists held a small rally to renew their demand that the government allow married couples to continue using different surnames. According to the civil code of 1898, a couple must adopt “the surname of the husband or wife” at the time of marriage. Polls show majority support for both men and women keeping their own last names.

In Turkey, women rallied in a central Istanbul neighborhood to try to demonstrate for their rights and protest the staggering death toll from the deadly earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria a month ago.

Thousands of people defied the official ban on the march and were met by the police, who fired tear gas and arrested several people. Similar incidents marred the efforts of previous years to hold the march.

In Europe, hundreds of ethnic Albanian women protested in the Kosovo capital against domestic violence by throwing black and red smoke bombs towards police headquarters. The protesters, who rallied under the slogan “We march, we don’t celebrate”, accused the police, the public prosecutor’s office and the courts of gender discrimination.

In Russia, where International Women’s Day is a national holiday, President Vladimir Putin presented several women with state awards during a ceremony in the Kremlin. He singled out a military paramedic and a journalist for doing their duty during the Ukraine war, which the Kremlin insists on calling a “special military operation.”

In Spain alone, hundreds of thousands of women -with expectations of exceeding one million participants, as in previous years- attended nightly demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities. Large rallies were also organized in many other cities around the world, while only minor events were held in some countries.

Although Spain has been registering one of the largest influxes of public in the world on March 8 for years, this year’s marches were marked by division within its own left-wing government over a law on sexual freedom that it has inadvertently carried to reduced sentences for hundreds of sex offenders.

Elsewhere in Europe, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Paris and other French cities to protest, carrying banners reading “Equal pay now” and “Solidarity with the women of the world.” The rallies focused on protesting against proposed changes to the pension system, which women’s groups say are unfair to working mothers.

PA Agency