Gambia’s Supreme Court docket is contemplating whether or not a regulation defending ladies and women from feminine genital mutilation (FGM) is constitutional. The apply, widespread in Gambia, usually includes forcibly restraining women whereas components of their genitals are reduce, typically with the wound sewn shut.
FGM constitutes torture and merciless, inhuman, or degrading therapy underneath worldwide human rights regulation. It can lead to dying or life lengthy well being issues reminiscent of infections, fetal deaths, obstetric issues, and psychological results. Now the Supreme Court docket will resolve whether or not ladies and women will proceed to be shielded from such dangerous practices.
Spiritual leaders and a member of parliament did not get parliament to overturn Gambia’s 2015 FGM ban in 2024. They’ve taken their battle all the way in which to the Supreme Court docket, 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 women from a widespread type of gender-based violence.
There’s no medical justification for FGM, based on the World Well being Group. Medicalization of FGM, during 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 is rarely 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, practically three-quarters of girls and women between 15 and 49 reported having the process, with virtually two-thirds reduce earlier than age 5. This isn’t an summary human rights problem—it’s a public well being disaster affecting thousands and thousands of girls and women and the results comply with them for all times.
FGM violates the appropriate of girls and women to the best attainable customary of well being, the appropriate to bodily integrity, and life. Ladies and women who’ve skilled FGM face issues throughout childbirth, continual 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 elementary human rights, the rights to well being, bodily integrity, and freedom from torture. The federal government even adopted a nationwide technique to eradicate the apply fully by 2030, aligning with world Sustainable Growth Targets. The federal government’s implementation of the ban and the technique has been sluggish and now confronted with challenges.
The Supreme Court docket is listening to arguments that ought to chill anybody who cares about human rights. Media reported that one witness, a outstanding Muslim chief, tried to justify the violence towards ladies and women, 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 apply’s profit is lowering ladies’s sexual want, “which may very well 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 apply predates Islam and isn’t common amongst Muslims—it’s a cultural apply that some communities have incorrectly linked to religion.
Furthermore, framing FGM as a constitutional proper to non secular freedom is deceptive. The Gambian structure restricts rights, together with non secular or cultural, that impinge on different folks’s elementary rights and freedoms, reminiscent of to life, from torture or inhuman therapy, and nondiscrimination.
Gambian organizations, together with the Community Towards Gender Base Violence and Ladies in Liberation and Management (WILL), are preventing this case. Civil society organizations mobilized survivors, group leaders, and ladies’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 women whose lives actually rely on sustaining these protections.
“That is taking place regardless of people being harassed, significantly 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,” mentioned 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 apply.
In July 2025, the federal government signed the African Union Conference on Ending Violence Towards Ladies, which was adopted earlier that 12 months, reaffirming its dedication to undertake and implement authorized measures to forestall dangerous practices and shield 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 Court docket. Nevertheless the court docket guidelines, the federal government must put money into ending FGM by means of complete teaching programs, community-led initiatives, robust enforcement of present legal guidelines, and medical and psychological help for survivors to guard a whole lot of hundreds of girls and women’ lives.
Juliana Nnoko is a senior ladies’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
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