On the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in 2020, the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed) in collaborationwith the Euro-Mediterranean Women’s Foundation (EMWF) organised an online seminar on gender-based violence (GBV). The seminar sought to start a debate with gender experts and activists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to discuss the subtleties of the increase in gender-based violence accompanying the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the modalities of its enfolding and the local and regional Euro-Mediterranean responses to it. The conversation attested to the fact that the feminist movements that criss-cross the Mediterranean space go beyond borders of any kind and are interwoven into a big network of feminist solidarity; the participants made room for the voices of women and girls from the region to be heard, and looked for opportunities to share relevant data,experiences and practices that can be extrapolated to different contexts.

This publication gathers the participants’ thoughts, suggestions and orientations, with the objective of disseminating the knowledge produced during the event, while dissecting the debate’s policy-orientations that emanated from the meeting.