Global Policy Forum

United Nations - A senior U.N. official welcomed on Monday Rwanda's new inheritance law that allows females as well as males to benefit from land and other properties. Rwanda's parliament adopted the legislation, that allows legitimate children of a deceased to ''inherit in equal parts without any discrimination between male and female children'' late last year but its constitutional court gave its approval this year.

Since the genocide in 1994, in which some 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, some 45,000 households are headed by orphaned children, 90 percent of them girls, according to Olara Otunnu, the U.N. envoy for children and armed conflict.

''I congratulate the Government of Rwanda for taking this bold step to rectify an injustice created by this age-old practice. This is a practical way of redressing one of the consequences of the genocide,'' Otunnu said. Some two-thirds of the world's nation have equal rights inheritance laws, although they are not all enforced.

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