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- As regards pensions for widowers, Switzerland makes unequal treatment between men and women inadmissible.
- The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has confirmed the complaint of a widower.
- The view that the husband pays for the wife’s support does not correspond to current conditions.
After the death of his wife, the man raised his two children alone and received a widower’s pension. When the youngest daughter came of age, the widower’s pension was revoked. The annulment of the pension would not have occurred if the widower had been a woman.
The limited widow’s pension is based on the assumption that the husband provides support for the wife. This point of view no longer corresponds to current conditions, notes the ECHR. The convention is a “living instrument” with which circumstances must be faced from the current perspective.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Keystone
Conscious unequal treatment
The Federal Court rejected the complaint of the person in question in May 2012 on the grounds that the legislator had made an explicit gender distinction in the AHV law, which was not based on biological or other differences. Therefore, when regulating the widow’s pension, the councils have deliberately adopted a provision contrary to the principle of equality and, therefore, to the federal constitution.
However, in its ruling at the time, the Federal Supreme Court referred to the Federal Council’s message on the 11th revision of the AHV rejected. The law on the right to a widow’s pension, according to which the pension would be canceled when the youngest child reached the age of majority, contradicts the principle of equal treatment between men and women, the Federal Council wrote at the time.
