Catalonia’s regional parliament on Thursday formally recognised that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people.
Lawmakers in the autonomous Spanish region passed a resolution accusing Israel of overseeing a system that is "contrary to international law and is equivalent to the crime of apartheid as defined in the Rome Statutes of the International Criminal Court, Article 7.2 (h)".
This makes the parliament in Catalonia the first in Europe to publicly acknowledge Israel’s imposition of apartheid, which has also been widely documented by international rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
MP Susana Segovia, a Catalan politician, activist, and current spokesperson for the left-wing party Catalunya en Comú called it a "historic moment".
"Today we call by name the violation of human rights in Palestine."
The resolution, first tabled in March, called on Catalonia's autonomous government and the central Spanish government to use all their political and diplomatic tools to hold Israel to account for its systematic rights abuses against Palestinians.
It also demanded that human rights are put at the heart of bilateral and multilateral agreements with official Israeli institutions.
"We hope that their courageous vote will inspire other regional parliaments of the Spanish state, as well as its state parliament, to also stand on the right side of history," the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement said in a statement released Thursday.
The global BDS movement is a solidarity campaign calling for the isolation of Israel in response to its crimes against Palestinians, which include illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, denial of the right to self-determination, forced expulsions, seizures of land and property, and unlawful killings.