Barcelona, The debate whether to accept the amendments to the whole of the ILP to forbid bullfighting in Catalonia will be at 9:00 o’clock (spanish time) in the morning on Friday the 18th of December.

The 11 members of the promoting commission of this Popular Initiative will be present in the Parliament hemicycle; one of us will be in the podium defending the proposal of Law in a 15 minute speech.
After this speech, the Members of Parliament representing the three parties (the Popular Party, the Citizens’ Party and Socialist Party of Catalunya) who wish to scrap the whole of the ILP (“enmienda a la totalitat”) will then have 15 minutes each to present their reasons.
Then, finally, representatives of the CiU, ERC and ICV parties (Convergencia i Unió, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and Iniciativa Verds) will explain their reasons for not requesting any amendments.

You can follow the vote live on the web site: www.parlament.cat.
The media are very interested in this debate and Parliament has informed us that they have received more requests for foreign press passes to cover this piece of news than to cover the debate of the Statute of Catalonia.

It is important to remember this vote is the first of a total of three, the third of which will be the one that determines if bullfighting is to be definitively prohibited by law.

After all the effort by so many people, we can only thank everyone for having got as far as this. The vote next Friday will be the fruit of the hard work by the “fedataris” (the officially recognized people who altruistically collected the almost 200,000 signatures) and of the thousands of citizens who signed in support of this proposal “Prou” to abolish bullfighting in Catalonia.

The imminent vote, but especially the degree of sensitivity Catalan society has for animals, is the culmination of a decades-long process where thousands of people have contributed.
At the same, we take this vote as a homage to all the people who have struggled for the prohibition of bullfighting in the past and cannot be here with us to see the fruit of their work, to enter Parliament with us and to be the voice that the bulls have never had until now.

Whether the result of the vote is positive or negative, the fruits that are borne this week are thanks both to those who have taking part in this campaign and also to all those who fought hard during the time when bullfighting was popular with the masses.

We have all arrived very far and abolition is very close. The will to abolish bullfighting is present in our Catalan society so whether finally it is manifested in the law of protection of animals 22/2003 or not, we believe that the bulls have already won the battle of consciousness.

Thank you, everyone. Our unity has brought us to where we are today.