The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) has called for a halt to all forms of encroachment on the rights of widows, while all discriminatory practices and witch-hunting targeted at them should stop.

The group in a statement signed by its director, Professor Is-haq Akintola, on Sunday in Ibadan, said that it was a crime against humanity to rob widows of welfare, joy and peace of mind after losing their husbands and bread-winners.

It charged people to create space in their hearts for the love of widows and to show compassion towards them, adding that all anti-widow practices were not only anachronistic, they were barbaric and inhuman.

It urged governments at all levels and institutions to put in place legislations capable of protecting Allah-given and fundamental rights of widows.

MURIC advised spouses to create machineries aimed at preventing women from suffering in the event of widowhood.

“In this regard, financial institutions should evolve special programmes to which living spouses can subscribe and from which women can benefit in the event of widowhood, while governments and peoples of the world should pursue the path of peace and to do everything possible to avoid war and violence.

“Men who die in large numbers during war constitute palpable threat to the survival of women and children,” it added.

MURIC which noted that the world marked the International Day of Widows last Saturday, said that the United Nations (UN) in year 2010 set aside the 23rd of June every year to jog the conscience of the world on the plight of widows.

 According to MURIC, there is no gainsaying the fact that widows suffer untold hardship in some cultures where there are no welfare packages for them.

“In some cultures, widows are abused and repressed. They are deprived of their Allah-given and fundamental rights. They are compelled to re-marry relations of their deceased husbands or thrown out of their late husbands’ houses into the wild world. Some innocent widows are accused of killing their husbands and made to undergo unbearable torture.

“This is aside the severe economic hardship they face at widowhood. Widows generally have been endangered species for long. They are double losers in a world dominated by conscienceless power,” it added.

“The victims of the abuse of widows were not the widows alone,” the group said, “but their children as well,” adding that the latter face multifarious socio-economic challenges.

“Alienation and abandonment often lead to anti-social behaviours. Seeing themselves as enemies of the public, the orphans join the rising army of social miscreants thereby causing crime to rise,” MURIC said.