UN welcomes new inheritance rights for women

The UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, has welcomed the government’s recent legislation to allow women and girls to inherit land and other properties. Under Rwandan tradition and law, it was expected that they would get access to communal properties owned by fathers or husbands, but the injustice of this gender discrimination became “a dramatic issue” after the 1994 genocide that left thousands of households headed by female children who were not entitled to inherit family properties, a UN press release stated on Monday. “There are an estimated 45,000 households headed by orphaned children, 90 percent of them by girls who did not have access to land which is essential to the livelihoods of their families. I congratulate the government of Rwanda ... this is a practical step of redressing one of the consequences of the genocide,” said Otunnu, who had been negotiating with the government on this issue since his visit to the country in February 1999.