The Diplomat
The Spanish Government assumed yesterday in Madrid the Presidency of the Ibero-American Initiative to Prevent and Eliminate Violence against Women (IIPEVCM), until now held by the Dominican Republic.
The handover of the Presidency took place at the Ministry of Equality, in the presence of the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero; the Minister of Women of the Dominican Republic, Mayra Jiménez, and the Ibero-American Secretary General (SEGIB), Andrés Allamand, among other authorities. As a result of this handover, the Spanish Ministry of Equality will replace the Ministry of Women’s Affairs of the Dominican Republic, which until now had promoted and coordinated the strategic planning of the Initiative.
The Ibero-American Initiative to Prevent and Eliminate Violence against Women emanates from a mandate of the XXVI Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government held in Antigua, Guatemala, in 2018. On that occasion, the countries pledged to join efforts to work to eliminate this form of violence in the region.
The Initiative was finally approved at the XXVII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government held in Andorra, in 2021, and pivots mainly on three axes: strengthening public policies and generating knowledge about the extent of violence against women in Ibero-America, strengthening care, protection and comprehensive reparation services, from a multidisciplinary perspective, and preventing and raising awareness about the issue and the creation of tools for collecting information.
The Initiative is currently made up of 13 of the 22 Ibero-American countries, ten of them as member states (Andorra, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Panama, Portugal, Dominican Republic and Uruguay) and the other three as guests (Ecuador, El Salvador and Peru).
“Gender equality, in addition to being a fundamental right, is an essential pillar for the construction of peaceful, prosperous and sustainable societies and the violence suffered by women today is evidence of a tremendous failure of our societies”, declared Andrés Allamand after the event.
According to Irene Montero, this is “the first official Ibero-American space for dialogue on political violence against women”. These official spaces, she added, “are necessary, apart from those that take place at the level of associations and civil society, so that we can also think of solutions to this violence from the institutions”.
For her part, Mayra Jiménez denounced the fact that violence “affects one in three women in the world and around 12% of women between the ages of 15 and 49 in Latin America”. For this reason, she warned, it is necessary to promote actions, “above all in terms of women’s empowerment and economic autonomy, as well as political participation and representation in areas of power and decision-making, as fundamental requirements for preventing violence and strengthening the democracies of Ibero-American countries”. According to Jiménez, this initiative has been made possible thanks to “the commitment and will of the different countries, which have understood that the phenomenon of violence against women is not an isolated incident, but is a matter for society as a whole, and even crosses borders”.
