• Commonwealth:
• International Widows Day

International Widows Day

Date: 23 Jun 2006
Speaker: Secretary-General Don McKinnon
Location: International Widows Conference, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, UK

FCO London UK, 23-06-2006

The death of anyone we know is a major loss in our lives. We've all seen relatives, friends and neighbours struggle with the enormity of grief following the death of a spouse - and at the same time, struggle to cope with the extra demands and the day-to-day consequences of a spouse's death. And yet for millions of women around the world the tragic death of a husband is accompanied by an even harsher blow, which might best be described as their own social and economic demise.

So on behalf of the 53-nation Commonwealth, with its political voice and its work in development, I'd like this morning not to raise questions, but to try to give some answers.

But I will raise one global question - simply, what is really at stake here today?

In part, yes, it is both the plight and the courage of widows, pure and simple.

India has been the focus of our attention - be it through the extraordinary courage and determination of Shrimati Pushpa Wati Loomba in bringing up her seven children - or the ongoing work of the Loomba Trust in educating widows' children in 15 Indian States - or even the power of images we have seen on the cinema screen. Deepa Mehta's controversial film 'Water' comes to mind: where an 8-year old bride loses her 50-year old husband, and is despatched to widows' home for the rest of her life.

Of course 'Water' is based on a story from a long time ago. But this year, in a slice of grim real life, I was shocked to read about a 77-year old woman who committed sati in a village in Bihar. Her husband died, and she climbed onto the funeral pyre and burned herself to death. Even more recently, a 35-year old did the same thing in Uttar Pradesh. Let's ask ourselves what this means. It means that widows would prefer to throw themselves onto the burning fire of their husband's remains rather than onto the rubbish heap of a society which they feel abandons them.

And yet here in the UK or almost any country in the so-called developed world could equally have been our focus this morning. In a country which - by and large - celebrates women as equals, there are as many sad tales of widows, just as widowers, struggling to survive. Any casualty in Iraq or Afghanistan leaves another widow - be she local or international. Having been born at the start of the 2nd World War, I had a number of school friends who were brought up by war widows.

Yet, beyond widows, the real issue we are discussing here is simply 'Women'.

Because in the first decade of the 21st century, a half of the world's population - the half, no less, that gives it life and nurtures it - is in many places neither seen nor heard. So on the day that you would like to see established as International Widows Day, 23rd June, I repeat some of the things that I said on International Women's Day, 8th March. 

• That two-thirds of those below the poverty line worldwide are women.
• That two-thirds of those who can't read or write are women.
• That 65 of the 115 million of the world's totally un-schooled children are girls. 
• That half a million women die every year in pregnancy or childbirth (there's a 1 in 500 chance in the UK, but a 1 in 13 - yes, 1 in 13 - chance in Africa).
• That women are now suffering much more than men from AIDS: young girls aged 15-24 now make up 60% of that age-group living with HIV and AIDS - with the figure going up to 75% in sub-Saharan Africa.

So the issue of widows is a subset of that of women. Widows are among the most vulnerable groups - within the most vulnerable group.

That is why the issue of gender equality impinges upon precisely everything we do at the Commonwealth. It's why we have produced this precious document: the Commonwealth Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005-2015, which was approved by the 53 Commonwealth Heads of Government at their last Summit in Malta in November.

The Plan of Action sets out what we will do in ensuring that gender equality is an intrinsic part of: our democracy, peace and conflict work; our work on human rights and the law; our work on poverty eradication and economic empowerment; and finally our work on HIV/AIDS.

The 'gender agenda' does more than rhyme. It's extremely broad. It's why our subject today, for instance, is also related to issues like political representation - did you know that only six of the Commonwealth countries have met our agreed target of 30% female representation in Parliament? (The UK, by the way, is way off the pace. And I'm sure that Cherie Blair could tell us a thing or two about discrimination at the UK Bar.)

It's why our subject today is related to the overarching goal of wiping out the poverty in which one in three people on this planet live. It is no coincidence that we have talked today of the Millennium Development Goals, above all the third Goal, that there should be equal numbers of girls and boys in school, and the fifth Goal, that we should drastically improve maternal health.

What we are really discussing is culture. We say that fundamental human rights should transcend local culture - and yet we own up to the fact that frequently they don't.

Today we have heard heart-rending tales of age disparities between husbands and wives, prices paid for brides, sons being favoured and daughters overlooked in a patrilineal society, disinherited widows, widows used and abused sexually and financially by in-laws, shaven-headed widows, witch-hunted widows, widowed women being forced to become polygamous wives, and often HIV sufferers in the process.

We sense, perhaps, that we are fighting a silent war fuelled by culture and stigma. We are asking how the developing world can advance if it wilfully leaves half of its population behind. We are echoing words I heard recently, describing the women of Africa as a permanently colonised people. Colonised by their fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles, in-laws - and by the systems of government and culture that have institutionalised and legitimised male power.

So again I pose the core question: what we can do about this discrimination? Raj Loomba knows that - for all the extraordinary individual efforts carried out by his Trust - these are drops in the ocean.

The answer is that we will turn this situation round if we act at three levels - the international, the national government level, and the national non-government level. I'd like to say a very few words on each.

First, the international solutions.

Without giving figures, most countries have signed up to beliefs that are the bedrock of women's rights - like the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of 1979, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women of 1993, the Beijing Platform for Action of 1995, and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security of 2000.

There are regional equivalents, too. Take the continent of Africa, and its Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights of 1986 with its Additional Protocol on Women's Rights of 2005.

While these instruments and commitments go a long way towards setting out what discrimination actually means, and what new or changed laws are needed to fight it, they still don't address the reality of the situation. How would a widow in Vrindawan, abandoned by her family, dispossessed and vulnerable, claim her rights citing specific articles in CEDAW, to which her country is a signatory? It is all too clear that the lack of a gender perspective in the administration of national law has stymied the gains made in international and regional treaties and conventions.

Which leads us to the second area of focus, that of national solutions.

We need a groundswell of change at the country level. Commonwealth Law Ministers at their Meeting in Ghana last year recognised that the mere passing of legislation was not sufficient.

At the national level, the tension is between customary law - often unwritten, but passed down over centuries of tradition amongst tribes and different ethnic groups - and civil law. It's often the case that customary law is applied in rural areas, and civil law in towns and cities. And it's customary law that is responsible for the worst of the abuses we have discussed today.

Wherever we look, we see a failure to harmonise national law with international instruments. And within national laws, we see Constitutions that may even officially outlaw sex discrimination - but which in practice allow it to continue through unchanged customary law. Cameroon is one such example - while Kenya and Nigeria are examples of constitutions which have expressly omitted the issue of the equality of the sexes.

A portion of the blame lies with the dispensers of justice themselves. Whether under-resourced or under-trained, it is frequently judges who are 'gender-blind' and fail to implement civil law and indulge the worst excesses of customary law.

Training judges to reconcile customary laws and civil laws is one solution. But this entails a long struggle. If you saw last year's film-documentary Sisters in Law, the remarkable documentary on a woman judge in Cameroon who works in rural Kumba and struggles to bring in concepts of 'gender equality under the law' in the face of both local custom and Islam, you will know what I mean.

There is so much more we can do, like establishing uniform marriage, property and inheritance laws; like creating a comprehensive system of marriage registration which is available to all; like providing legal aid for women.

Third, there are the civil society solutions.

There are increasing numbers of Civil Society Organisations whose reason for being is to protect women's rights. Whether organisations like the International Network of Women Living under Muslim Laws, the International Women's Rights Action Watch, or Women in Law and Development in Africa, or even local organisations like the Widows Development Organisation in Nigeria - all have made considerable headway in raising awareness of abuses, pushing for new legislation, and setting up much needed services for women. They need all our support.

So ladies and gentlemen, the issue of widows is not going to go away. Above and beyond the biological fact that women live longer than men, our world increasingly creates widows when men are the victims of war and armed conflict or of disease. Gone is the stereotypical 'old lady' widow: widows of our time are ever younger. Statistics on widows are notoriously unreliable. But if we take just two African examples: 4 million people killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the last 6 years, and half a million people dying of AIDS in South Africa last year - then ask yourself how many new widows that means? And if a woman has 2 or 3 children, ask how many orphans?

I have hinted at the way the world needs to react. For its part, the Commonwealth's approach to the problem is above all one of dialogue. Dialogue to change minds, attitudes, customs, laws and practice.

I have mentioned our Ministerial meetings - Heads of Government, education, law, health and more - and next year the 8th Women's Affairs Ministers Meeting will take place in Kampala in June.

But much of the dialogue is closer to the ground. Less than a month ago, for instance, we ran a colloquium in Yaoundé, Cameroon on gender, culture and the law. People came from six West African countries - there were judges, lawyers, academics, government and NGO representatives in attendance. We looked at the legal and social dimensions of marriage, and especially marriage under custom law. We looked specifically at widows. We looked, too, at violence against women, and AIDS and women.

I cannot over-emphasise the importance of dialogue. I was told after the colloquium that a judge from Nigeria in his 50s said he had learnt more in two days of dialogue with fellow judges, magistrates, women's rights activists and traditional leaders than from years of sitting in judgement on women's cases.

We are now planning to run similar seminars in the next two years across the Commonwealth. The entire Commonwealth family has embraced gender equality. The Commonwealth Magistrates and Judges Association, for instance, has developed a gender and human rights toolkit which is being distributed to judges through their workshops.

Dialogue and dividends - it's what the Commonwealth is about; it's what this Conference is about. I warmly applaud the Loomba Trust in its work in India and its lobbying worldwide to establish an International Widows Day. I commend anyone and everyone who does anything to ease the widow's plight, wherever they are. Thank you.