On the European Parliament celebration of the 100^th anniversary of International’s Women’s Day, Mary Robinson, first female President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, made a tribute to North Africa Women ongoing fight for freedom and equality.

“Women are now on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to struggle against the imbalance between men and women and to show that they want to equally participate in the society, helping to change priorities of problems that have  been neglected and marginalized during all these years”, Mary Robinson declared.

Defending that gender based violence is a human rights abuse that transcends nationality, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, that occurs every country around the world, the former human Rights High Commissioner asked MEP’s to support a peaceful transition in the countries where the protests were mainly done by women and youth.

“I’ve witnessed that the world can change in a good direction and that is possible to build a new way of living and to stop with a systematic discrimination. When I visited Rwanda after the genocide I’ve seen the most beautiful flowers of my life blooming in the ground. Afterwards, a NGO member explained me that they were so beautiful because human blood is one of the best fertilizers that exist”, said Mary Robinson while explaining that “the most important is that Rwandese have heroically rebuild a new society after such a tragedy, which is now a good example for the entire world.”

But the world doesn’t need apparent changes, “we need transformative changes”, the former president emphasized.