With the presence of the President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the special meeting of the parliamentary committees of Social Affairs and Equality, Youth and Human Rights for the Day of Women is being held in the Plenary Session of the Parliament.

During her opening statement, the President of the Republic paid tribute to the women, symbols of the struggle for freedom and independence of the homeland.

“It is an honour for me to stand before the National Delegation and to address you, today, Women’s Day, from my position as President of the Hellenic Republic, which for the first time reserved for a woman this high office. This gives me the opportunity to talk about the woman who is present in social, economic, political life every day of the year.”

“We owe our freedom to the struggles of these women”, she said referring to the females that fought in the 1821 War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire”.

“I think about how much struggle it took for women to claim the equal social inclusion they hoped employment would offer them.”

Mrs. Sakellaropoulou also referred to the Greek movement #metoo: “On the other hand, however, from the side of the injured female dignity, the voices are multiplying. The Greek #MeToo movement has revealed an incurable and unacknowledged social wound: the intra-family, intra-professional, intra-union forms of authoritarianism that result in chronic underestimation, exploitation, and violence against women.”

In his short speech, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, commenting on the President’s position: “Listening to the reports of a number of important Greek women who put their stamp on the revolution and the formation of the modern state, I wonder how many of them are known in history and what we teach is from the masculine gender which speaks of heroes and not of heroines. Thank you for the important historical position that highlighted the historical role of Greek women for all this journey that completes 200 years since the Greek revolution.”