Libera!


Libera! is a Spanish non profit animal rights organization. To create sensitivity, they especially make education campaigns and of public awareness, complaints and other protest actions. Libera! was founded in 2004 in Barcelona. In their origins they usually made actions at Catalonia until it converts into a national organisation.
One of their campaigns that have achieved a major international media is the campaign Libera a Susi, which aims at the Barcelona Zoo let the only elephant is still alive there, the African elephant named Susi, which according to Libera! and the British organisation Born Free Foundation suffered severe psychological problems resulting from loneliness, is moved to an elephant sanctuary, where she could live in better conditions on a near to freedom state and in company of other elephants.
This campaign has received support from the world of culture, as the Nobel Prize for Literature José Saramago, the Queen Sofía and personalities in the Barcelona municipal politics, as Imma Mayol, among others. Libera! Libera! conducted this campaign with the support of the Fundación Faada and the Born Free Foundation.
Libera! formed also together with Fundación FAADA, Plataforma Rambles Ètiques, which campaigns to ensure that, in compliance with the Animal Protection Act 22/2003 and the Ordinance on the Protection of Animals of the Barcelona City Council will stop selling animals in the traditional bird shops of La Rambla. In various media campaigns, the Plataforma Rambles Ètiques denounced the conditions in which animals live and that are thrown away to garbage the bodies of many animals that die, although the practice is not legally allowed to threaten public health. Otherwise, the shopkeepers has also thrown in the trash even living animals.
Libera! is also, along with the Platform SOS Stop Our Shame and CAS International, coordinator of the Plataforma Galicia Mellor Sen Touradas which aims to abolish bull fighting in Galicia. This campaign has the support of environmental galician organizations as ADEGA or Matar por matar non.
In March 2009, Libera! brought a lawsuit against the former Minister Mariano Fernández Bermejo for the crime of poaching during the respective hunting without license that was made in February of that year with the judge of the Audiencia Nacional, Baltasar Garzón, when Bermejo still was Minister of Justice.