Page 13 - BPW-UK - E-news - Edition 109 - February 2023 with BELFAST AGM 2023 Flyer_Neat

Widows’ lives are mostly determined by deeply enshrined customs and traditional
codes that take precedence over any national laws and international laws proscribing
VAWG and endorsing gender equality and the empowerment of women.

In these countries widows tend to have no rights to inheritance, land ownership, or
even access to justice; they may be subject to extreme forms of HTPs, (harmful tra-
ditional practices), treated like “chattels”, to be “ inherited“ by the dead husband’s
kin, or “chased off” the homestead, displaced, and abandoned to extreme penury,
and in armed conflict environments such practices are exacerbated.

On March 6th opens the 67th session of the UN CSW. Yet again, WPD and its part-
ners and supporters - that Includes the UK Government - are demanding that the
draft Agreed Conclusions cover the particular needs and treatment of widows.
“Marital Status” must be INCLUDED as a criterion in disaggregating data.

One milestone reached last March was the adoption by the UNGA of a Resolution on
the Treatment of Widows.

We also need too to look at the status of widows here in the UK. For example, mili-
tary widows, HIV/AIDs widows, widows in ethnic minority communities, migrant and
refugee widows. Are we guilty of neglect of widowhood issues in this country too?


The sixty-seventh session of the

Commission on the Status of Women
will take place from 6 to 17 March 2023

and will consider the priority theme of,

"Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for

achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls".

The session will also review the agreed conclusions of the sixty-second session,

"Challenges and opportunities in achieving

gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls"