The Gambian Supreme Court stands on the precipice of a decision that could dismantle legal protections for millions of women and girls. For the mothers who survived the razor, this judicial review represents more than a technical evaluation of the country’s 2015 ban on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). It is the culmination of a decade-long failure of state power to enforce its own statutes against a highly organized, deeply funded conservative counter-offensive. While international observers celebrate the 2024 parliamentary vote that temporarily blocked a repeal of the law, the reality on the ground in Banjul and rural provinces like the Central River Region reveals a far more volatile crisis. The legislative framework is fracturing because the state never truly committed to the hard work of grassroots enforcement, leaving a vacuum that religious hardliners and populist politicians have aggressively filled.
Statistically, the numbers paint a devastating picture. Nearly three-quarters of Gambian women between the ages of 15 and 49 have undergone FGM. More than half of those girls were cut before their fifth birthday. The 2015 ban, enacted under the authoritarian regime of Yahya Jammeh, was hailed as a monumental victory for human rights. Yet, for eight years, not a single individual was prosecuted under the act. When the first convictions finally occurred in August 2023, involving three women who cut eight young girls, it did not signal the dawn of accountability. Instead, it triggered an immediate, fierce backlash that brought the nation’s legal infrastructure to its knees. For a different perspective, see: this related article.
The Mirage of Legal Deterrence
Passage of a law does not automatically change human behavior. In the years following the 2015 prohibition, the state practiced a policy of deliberate blindness. Police officers looked the other way. Local magistrates avoided the social ostracization that came with prosecuting respected elders. The sudden enforcement in 2023 acted as a lightning rod because it disrupted a comfortable arrangement where the law existed to satisfy Western donors while the practice continued unabated in the villages.
When the Kaur/Kuntaur Magistrates' Court ordered those three cutters to pay a fine of 15,000 dalasis or serve a year in prison, the conservative establishment viewed it as an existential threat. High-profile imams, backed by political opportunists, immediately raised funds to pay the fines, turning convicted lawbreakers into cultural martyrs. This dynamic exposed the fundamental weakness of relying solely on the judiciary. Without a corresponding investment in community education and alternative livelihoods for traditional cutters, the law became an alien imposition rather than a shared societal value. Similar analysis regarding this has been shared by The New York Times.
The underground economy of cutting thrives because it is tied to status and social inclusion. A girl who is not cut is often labeled as unclean, rendered ineligible for marriage, and excluded from traditional networks of female solidarity. By criminalizing the practice without dismantling the social structures that reward it, the state forced FGM further into the shadows. Medicalization has risen sharply, with families quietly paying health workers to perform the procedure under the guise of safe medical interventions, a practice that the African Union’s Maputo Protocol explicitly forbids but which remains difficult to monitor behind closed clinic doors.
The Parliamentary Near Miss and the Judicial Strategy
The political assault on the ban reached a fever pitch in early 2024 when lawmaker Almameh Gibba introduced the Women’s (Amendment) Bill, which aimed to decriminalize FGM entirely. The political math was terrifying for human rights defenders. During its second reading in March 2024, only five out of fifty-three members of parliament voted against the bill. The country was weeks away from becoming the first nation in history to reverse a legislative ban on FGM.
Though intense mobilization by local civil society groups and international pressure eventually forced lawmakers to reject the bill in July 2024, the victory was fragile. The pushback did not stop; it merely changed venue. Pro-FGM coalitions, led by figures like former state imam Abdoulie Fatty, shifted their strategy from the legislature to the Supreme Court. Their current constitutional challenge argues that the 2015 ban violates Section 25 of the Gambian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and culture.
This legal argument is built on a dangerous premise. It asserts that female circumcision is an Islamic obligation, a claim that major Islamic scholars across the globe, as well as progressive local faith leaders, have repeatedly debunked. FGM predates Islam in West Africa and is not practiced in the vast majority of the Muslim world. Yet, in a country where religious identity is deeply intertwined with political power, challenging the edicts of conservative imams carries a heavy political cost. Politicians are terrified of alienating the religious voting blocs, which explains why the executive branch has remained largely silent during the ongoing Supreme Court hearings.
The Human Toll Behind the Constitutional Debate
While lawyers argue over constitutional interpretations in the capital, the physical consequences of this institutional paralysis are borne by infants and young girls. In late 2025, a one-month-old baby girl bled to death in a rural district following an FGM procedure. Another infant met the same fate just months prior. These are not isolated accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of a system where the law provides no actual protection because the state refuses to police the private sphere.
The medical realities of FGM are horrific. It involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia, performed without anesthesia by traditional practitioners using unsterile razor blades, knives, or glass shards. The immediate risks include catastrophic hemorrhaging, neurogenic shock, and fatal infections like tetanus. Long-term survivors face a lifetime of chronic pain, recurrent urinary tract infections, severe complications during childbirth, and profound psychological trauma akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mothers who wish to protect their daughters are trapped in an impossible dilemma. If they refuse to allow the procedure, they risk total social banishment for themselves and their children. In close-knit Gambian communities, being cast out means losing access to mutual aid, economic cooperatives, and family support systems. The state provides no safety net for these dissenting mothers. There are no safe houses, no economic relocation programs, and no legal protection units dedicated to safeguarding families who defy traditional mandates.
The Regional Repercussions of Gambian Vacillation
The outcome of the Supreme Court case will resonate far beyond the borders of The Gambia. West Africa is currently locked in a broader ideological struggle over women's bodily autonomy. In neighboring Sierra Leone, despite a landmark 2025 ruling by the ECOWAS Court of Justice characterizing FGM as a form of torture, President Julius Maada Bio signed a Child Rights Act that conspicuously omitted a ban on the practice, bowing to the political power of traditional secret societies.
If The Gambia’s Supreme Court strikes down or significantly weakens the 2015 ban, it will set a disastrous precedent across the continent. It will signal to conservative movements in Senegal, Mali, and Guinea that international human rights treaties can be successfully dismantled through domestic litigation and populist pressure. The Gambia has ratified the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the Maputo Protocol, both of which explicitly demand the eradication of FGM. A ruling against the ban would create a severe constitutional crisis, pitting the country’s international legal obligations directly against its domestic judicial findings.
True eradication will not be achieved by a favorable court ruling alone. Even if the Supreme Court upholds the law, the statue remains a dead letter without a fundamental shift in state policy. The government must move past performative compliance with international treaties and begin funding sustained, community-led enforcement mechanisms. This requires deploying resources to rural clinics, integrating human rights education into the national school curriculum, and actively prosecuting not just the traditional cutters, but the wealthy patrons and religious authorities who finance and facilitate these operations. Until the state treats the cutting of a child as a violent assault rather than a sensitive cultural debate, the law will continue to fail the very people it was designed to protect.
