Posto Occupato: the Antonio Papisca Human Rights Centre joins the campaign for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, November 25, 2025

On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, November 25, the Antonio Papisca University Center for Human Rights at the University of Padua is participating in the Posto Occupato campaign, which has been active since 2013 to send a concrete message against femicide by symbolically occupying a public or private place (a bench, a chair, a seat in a theater) to remember the absence of women victims of violence.

Together with the staff of the Human Rights Center, more than fifty international students from various universities around the world have joined the campaign. They are currently participating in the eighth edition of the Padova Model UPR, which is being conducted until November 28, 2025.

Every November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women is celebrated, established by the United Nations with Resolution (A/RES/48/104), in memory of the terrible murder of the three Mirabal sisters during the Dominican regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in 1960.

Violence against women is defined by the 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women as

any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.