Press Release
For our family of professions, International Women’s Day has always been, and still is, an
opportunity to celebrate the immense contribution our female colleagues bring every day,
through innovation, excellence, public health and safety, quality of advice and service, and
growth, to our communities. It is also a landmark enabling us to take stock of the progress
realised within the European Union towards achieving a real gender equality not only at work
but in all aspects of domestic and social life, and to strive for improvement.
Every 8th of March, and indeed, everyday, our minds go to those women who have seen their
rights and life conditions drastically deteriorate these last years because of oppressive
regimes and continuing wars. Their cause is also our cause.
As a collective EU voice of the professions of healthcare, of number, of compass, and of law,
the European Council of the Liberal Professions pleads to continue working for their rights,
and remains more than ever committed to do its bit for a fairer world for women and girls at
home and around the globe.
Once again this year, this important day of reflection on women and their contribution to
modern society, is marked by an authoritarian power that suppresses one of the most
authoritative and uncomfortable voices of contemporary Arab feminism: on March 2, Yanar
Mohammed, an Iraqi feminist activist and founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom
in Iraq (OWFI), was killed in a cowardly assassination outside her home in Baghdad. With
her death, we lose a professional who spent 20 years personifying the possibility of a
different, fairer, freer, and more humane Iraq, opening a deep rift in Iraqi society and in the
history of Arab feminist resistance. We have only one thing to say to her: thank you!