DEMONSTRATIONS across Spain and Europe have taken place today (Thursday) in protest over a Navarra court's having convicted a group of men who gang-raped a woman at a fiesta for 'sexual abuse' rather than 'rape'.
The five youths, dubbed La Manada ('The Herd'), have been sentenced to nine years each in jail for the attack on a girl – who is now aged 20 - at Pamplona's Sanfermínes bull-running festival in 2016.
According to the judge, there is insufficient evidence of 'sexual assault', or 'the violence necessary for a rape charge to apply'.
State prosecutors had called for 22 years and 10 months in prison for each, and the private prosecution called for 24 years and nine months.
The trial has attracted widespread attention in the press and on social media, and those waiting outside the court for the verdict were the first to protest.
Their outrage quickly spread to the rest of Spain, and demonstrations were held this evening in almost every region.
Scheduled protests took place in Alicante, Valencia, Castellón and Alcoi (Comunidad Valenciana), Zaragoza and Huesca (Aragón), Manacor (Mallorca, Balearic Islands), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands), Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga and Sevilla (Andalucia), Valladolid, Segovia, Salamanca, Palencia, León and Burgos (Castilla y León), Gijón and Oviedo (Asturias), As Pontes, Bertamiráns, A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense, Vigo and Santiago de Compostela (Galicia), Santander (Cantabria), Bilbao (Basque Country), Barcelona (Catalunya) and Cartagena and Murcia (Region of Murcia).
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com