A dangerous test of The Gambia’s commitment to girls’ rights is unfolding quietly but decisively in the courts, as a coalition of religious leaders and a serving lawmaker is attempting to overturn the country’s ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), arguing that the law violates cultural and religious freedoms.
Development Diaries reports that the case, now before the Supreme Court, challenges legislation that has been in place since 2015 and was meant to offer one of the strongest protections for girls in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of FGM.
FGM is criminalised because it causes permanent physical and psychological harm. Last year alone, two infants reportedly died in The Gambia as a result of FGM-related complications.
These were not consenting adults making cultural choices. They were newborns subjected to irreversible violence before they could speak, walk, or refuse.
The attempt to roll back the ban follows a failed parliamentary effort in 2024 to repeal the law. That failure should have settled the issue. Instead, the fight has moved to the courts, exposing the deeper problem that when laws are weakly enforced, they invite defiance.
The Gambia’s anti-FGM law exists on paper, but enforcement has been uneven. In a context where roughly 75 percent of women aged 15 to 49 have undergone FGM, often as infants, the law was never meant to be passive.
It was meant to actively disrupt a harmful practice sustained by silence, fear, and social pressure. Where enforcement is weak, those invested in preserving the practice gain confidence to challenge the law itself.
Also, responsibility for this failure does not rest with the courts alone. It sits with the legislature that must defend the law it passed, the Ministry of Justice that must prosecute violations, and law enforcement agencies that must investigate and act.
Meanwhile, women’s rights advocates in The Gambia see the current court challenge as part of a broader regression, not an isolated incident, with the founder of Women in Liberation and Leadership, Fatou Baldeh, warning that the very fact that FGM is still being debated at the national level is evidence that women’s rights are slipping backwards.
Girls’ bodily integrity and freedom from violence are guaranteed under international and regional human rights frameworks to which The Gambia is a party. Infants cannot consent, and culture does not override harm; neither does religious belief justify permanent injury or death. The state’s primary obligation is to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
As always, the burden of failure falls unevenly, with rural girls, children born into poor households, and newborns in communities with limited access to information or protection facing the highest risk.
What happens next will reveal whether The Gambia views girls as rights-bearing citizens or as collateral in political compromise.
The ban must be robustly defended in court, with offenders prosecuted consistently, not selectively. Community-level enforcement and education must be funded, not outsourced to under-resourced activists. Anything less sends the message that laws protecting girls can be negotiated away when pressure mounts.
