Muhamadou Bittaye/AFP/Getty Photographs
Anti feminine genital mutilation (FGM) protesters grasp placards outdoor Gambia’s Nationwide Meeting in Banjul on March 18, 2024.
The Gentleman Report
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Gambia’s parliament has voted to uphold a landmark legislation that bans feminine genital mutilation (FGM) within the in large part Muslim country, after non secular teams driven for the law to be repealed.
If Monday’s bid were a hit, the tiny West African nation would were the primary on the earth to relegalize FGM after criminalizing it.
MP Amadou Camara, who chairs a joint well being and gender committee that really useful that FGM must stay outlawed, informed The Gentleman Report that not one of the clauses in quest of the repeal of the ban within the Ladies’s (Modification) Invoice 2024 was once handed.
Parliament Speaker Fabakary Jatta dominated that it was once “unimaginable” for the invoice, which handed a 2nd studying 4 months in the past, to be learn a 3rd time and to go with out the ones clauses. “I so rule that the invoice is rejected, and the legislative procedure exhausted,” Jatta mentioned at plenary assembly Monday.
FGM was once prohibited in Gambia in 2015 by means of former president Yahya Jammeh who approved the imposition of fines and jail sentences of as much as 3 years for many who engaged in it.
The legislation additionally punished perpetrators with existence sentences in circumstances the place the observe resulted in demise.
Professional-Islamic teams and lawmakers driven again in opposition to the criminalization, announcing that feminine circumcision was once “some of the virtues of Islam.”
Different outstanding Gambians, similar to opposition chief and previous inner minister Mai Ahmad Fatty additionally defended the observe, arguing that: “There is not any FGM in Gambia. We circumcise, no longer mutilate.”
Human rights group Amnesty World previous described efforts to revoke the FGM ban as a “backward transfer” for the safety of human rights within the nation. In Gambia, 73% of girls elderly between 15 and 49 years had skilled FGM as of 2020, in line with the United Countries.
Greater than 65% of the ones girls have been subjected to the observe “sooner than the age of 5 years,” the UN mentioned.
UN Secretary-Common Antonio Guterres mentioned on Ladies’s Day in March that he was once “outraged” by means of strikes by means of Gambia’s parliament to legalize FGM, describing the observe as “horrific.”
Regardless of the ban, FGM has nonetheless been carried out on youngsters in portions of the rustic. Final 12 months, 3 girls have been convicted of acting the observe on 8 feminine minors and ordered to pay fines of round 15,000 Gambian Dalasi ($220) every or face a one-year prison sentence. The consequences have been reported to were paid by means of an Islamic cleric.
In 2016, two girls additionally confronted fees after a 5-month-old woman died from genital mutilation.
