2024-03-04 18:12:21
Banned in the country since 2015, the practice is still done in secret.
Abdoulie Fatty, a staunch pro-female genital mutilation (FGM) campaigner, made his plea to the Gambian National Assembly to support a bill that aims to lift the ban on the practice.
On Monday, Imam Fatty led a group of other clerics and some veiled schoolgirls through the corridors of the National Assembly in Banjul, while a bill defended by an MP was presented before the MPs.
A few meters away stood a group of staunch anti-FGM activists among Gambian gender equality activists who have stood once morest the bill since it was proposed by Foni Kansala MP Almamy Gibba .
Gibba belongs to a faction of the former Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) of exiled former president Yahya Jammeh. The other faction is led by the current President of the National Assembly, Fabakary Tombong Jatta.
Anti-FGM activists have described the bill as a sad day in Gambia’s history.
The practice of excision was criminalized in The Gambia in 2015, when former President Jammeh described it as a decisive moment bringing his country fully into the 21st century, where such practices, which mark women and girls for life, have no place in the future of the country.
However, nine years following the ban, local and international activists have warned that legislation once morest FGM is under threat from an unyielding campaign led mainly by religious scholars and tradition keepers to “resurrect the practice”.
The clerics took their campaign a step further, paying the fines of FGM practitioners prosecuted and found guilty of breaking the law and invoking the Koran to justify the practice as virtuous in Islam.
The campaign sparked backlash from continental watchdogs like the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, which joined with a civil society group in The Gambia to criticize a “ “regressive parliamentary debate” on the issue and commit to protecting women and girls once morest the harmful consequences of FGM.
An amendment to the 2010 Women’s Law was adopted in 2015. It is based on a series of legal instruments, including the Maputo Protocol, adopted by the African Union in 2003 and ratified by some of its member states .
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