Gambia’s Supreme Courtroom is contemplating whether or not a regulation defending ladies and ladies from feminine genital mutilation (FGM) is constitutional. The follow, widespread in Gambia, typically includes forcibly restraining ladies whereas components of their genitals are lower, generally with the wound sewn shut.
FGM constitutes torture and merciless, inhuman, or degrading therapy beneath worldwide human rights regulation. It may end up in dying or life lengthy well being issues equivalent to infections, fetal deaths, obstetric issues, and psychological results. Now the Supreme Courtroom will determine whether or not ladies and ladies will proceed to be shielded from such dangerous practices.
Non secular leaders and a member of parliament didn’t get parliament to overturn Gambia’s 2015 FGM ban in 2024. They’ve taken their battle all the best way to the Supreme Courtroom, contending that the ban violates constitutional rights to cultural and spiritual freedom. This effort isn’t only a setback for one small West African nation—it’s a part of a world backlash towards ladies’s rights that threatens to unravel many years of progress defending ladies and ladies from a widespread type of gender-based violence.
There’s no medical justification for FGM, in accordance with the World Well being Group. Medicalization of FGM, through which the process is carried out by well being personnel, doesn’t scale back the violation of human rights. No matter the place and by whom it’s carried out, FGM isn’t secure.
Nonetheless, over 230 million women and girls have undergone FGM, with about 63 % of those survivors (144 million) in Africa. In Gambia in 2020, almost three-quarters of girls and ladies between 15 and 49 reported having the process, with virtually two-thirds lower earlier than age 5. This isn’t an summary human rights difficulty—it’s a public well being disaster affecting hundreds of thousands of girls and ladies and the results observe them for all times.
FGM violates the precise of girls and ladies to the very best attainable normal of well being, the precise to bodily integrity, and life. Ladies and ladies who’ve skilled FGM face issues throughout childbirth, power infections, psychological trauma, and in some circumstances, dying. In August 2025, a one-month-old child woman bled to dying after FGM was carried out on her.
The federal government’s 2015 ban was a breakthrough. Gambia joined dozens of nations recognizing that FGM violates basic human rights, the rights to well being, bodily integrity, and freedom from torture. The federal government even adopted a nationwide technique to get rid of the follow completely by 2030, aligning with world Sustainable Improvement Targets. The federal government’s implementation of the ban and the technique has been sluggish and now confronted with challenges.
The Supreme Courtroom is listening to arguments that ought to chill anybody who cares about human rights. Media reported that one witness, a distinguished Muslim chief, tried to justify the violence towards ladies and ladies, saying that “feminine circumcision” is a part of Islam and isn’t dangerous. When requested about two infants who died from the process, he replied: “We’re Muslims and if somebody dies, it’s God’s will.” He went on to say that the follow’s profit is decreasing ladies’s sexual need, “which could possibly be an issue for males.”
The plaintiffs’ courtroom arguments don’t maintain as much as scrutiny. There’s no requirement for FGM in Sharia (Islamic regulation). It’s not a part of the Sunna (Prophetic traditions) or thought of an honorable act. The follow predates Islam and isn’t common amongst Muslims—it’s a cultural follow that some communities have incorrectly linked to religion.
Furthermore, framing FGM as a constitutional proper to spiritual freedom is deceptive. The Gambian structure restricts rights, together with non secular or cultural, that impinge on different folks’s basic rights and freedoms, equivalent to to life, from torture or inhuman therapy, and nondiscrimination.
Gambian organizations, together with the Community In opposition to Gender Base Violence and Ladies in Liberation and Management (WILL), are preventing this case. Civil society organizations mobilized survivors, group leaders, and girls’s teams throughout the nation to defeat efforts to repeal the regulation in Parliament in 2024. The opposition to the case is coming from ladies and ladies whose lives actually depend upon sustaining these protections.
“That is occurring regardless of people being harassed, notably on social media, for talking out towards the case creating an environment the place many survivors, together with ladies’s rights defenders, are actually selecting to be silent,” stated Fatou Baleh, an anti-FGM activist, FGM survivor, and founding father of WILL.
Gambia has ratified the African Constitution on Human and Peoples’ Rights, its Protocol on the Rights of Ladies in Africa (Maputo Protocol), and the African Constitution on the Rights and Welfare of the Little one. Article 5 (b) of the Maputo Protocol explicitly prohibits all types of FGM and medicalization of the follow.
In July 2025, the federal government signed the African Union Conference on Ending Violence In opposition to Ladies, which was adopted earlier that 12 months, reaffirming its dedication to undertake and implement authorized measures to forestall dangerous practices and defend survivors, reinforcing the constitutional responsibility to uphold the FGM ban.
The well being and well-being of women and girls in Gambia now rests with the Supreme Courtroom. Nonetheless the courtroom guidelines, the federal government must put money into ending FGM by complete education schemes, community-led initiatives, robust enforcement of present legal guidelines, and medical and psychological help for survivors to guard a whole bunch of 1000’s of girls and ladies’ lives.
Juliana Nnoko is a senior ladies’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
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