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Lifting the FGM ban: Gambia and Liberia, two mechanisms

Gambia's Supreme Court is reviewing its 2015 law criminalizing FGM. Liberia's traditional moratorium ends August 15. Two countries, two mechanisms at stake.

ANALYTICAL ARTICLE

8/4/20267 min read

I. Two countries, the same institutional tug-of-war

In West Africa, The Gambia and Liberia are two countries where the legal status of bans on female genital mutilation (FGM) is currently being put to the test. In the Gambia, what’s at stake is a Supreme Court challenge seeking to strike down the criminalization of FGM found in the Women’s (Amendment) Act of 2015. In Liberia, a traditional moratorium on the practice, not codified into law, is set to be lifted by the Council of Chiefs on August 15, while a bill to ban FGM permanently remains stalled in parliament. The mechanisms differ, one judicial, one traditional/executive; both raise the same question: can a protection survive the moment it’s actually tested?

II. The Gambia, a challenge in the courts

The push to overturn The Gambia’s FGM ban began in parliament. On March 4, 2024, MP Almameh Gibba proposed a bill in the National Assembly to repeal the 2015 ban; Assembly members voted 42-4 to advance it to the Health and Gender Committee for review. On July 15, 2024, the National Assembly rejected the bill after the committee’s report.Fifteen days later, on July 30, 2024, Gibba and seven co-applicants filed a case directly with the Supreme Court. The case ( Almameh Gibba and Seven Others v. The Attorney General) asks the Court to declare that Sections 32A and 32B of the Women’s ( Amendment) Act, 2015, which criminalize female circumcision, are unconstitutional. The applicants argue the law violated sections 17, 25, 28, 32 and 33 of the 1997 Constitution. The case is before a five-judge panel chaired by Chief Justice Hassan B. Jallow ( with retirement in August 2026), with Counsel Lamin J. Darboe representing the plaintiffs and Counsel J.O. Okete representing the State.

By late January 2026, the plaintiffs had closed their case, and the State had opened its defense, calling government witnesses to testify on the legislative process that preceded the 2015 Act. As of this writing, the Supreme Court has not yet ruled.

III. Liberia, a challenge from the executive

Liberia’s moratorium began with a one-year ban imposed in 2019 under the Ganta Declaration, signed by traditional leaders. That ban ended in June 2020 with no legal provision to replace it. On February 21, 2022, the National Council of Chiefs and Elders of Liberia (NACCEL), led by Chief Zanzan Karwor, announced a new three-year suspension of FGM, signed by 150 traditional leaders from 11 practicing counties.

On February 6, 2023, Chief Karwor went further, proclaiming a permanent ban on the practice during International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM ceremonies in Sonkay Town, Montserrado County. That proclamation, like the moratorium before it, never had the force of law; it was declared by a traditional body, not an act of legislature.

The moratorium expired on February 5, 2025. At the Time, the UN Resident Coordinator in Liberia, Comfort Lamptey, noted that FGM remained widespread in 11 of Liberia’s 15 counties despite the moratorium having been in place. Sometime in 2025, President Joseph Boakai submitted a bill to the legislature seeking to ban FGM permanently; as of mid-2026, it remains pending. In July 2026, Internal Affairs Minister Francis Sakila Nyumalin announced that the Council of Chiefs would formally lift the moratorium on August 15, 2026, after finalizing new rules and regulations governing the practice.

IV. The arguments in defense of the practice

Both cases feature arguments to reverse a protection, but the arguments take different shapes.

In The Gambia, three arguments have been advanced for lifting the ban. The first classification: FGM is medically categorized into four types, and testimony before the Supreme Court has argued that only types 2 through 4 ( the more invasive forms) should remain criminalized, while type 1 should be permitted. The second is religious: proponents argue the practice is not commanded in the Qur’an but is supported through hadith, and that criminalizing it infringes on religious freedom. The third calls for medicalizing the practice, regulating how it is performed rather than banning it outright, with the stated aim of reducing fatalities and complications.

In Liberia, the arguments against the moratorium are cultural, economic, and political rather than religious. The Cultural argument holds that the practice is embedded in traditional structures ( associated with women’s societies such as Sande) and is understood locally as a rite of initiation into adulthood, not as an act of mutilation. The economic argument centers on the Zoes, the traditional female leaders who perform the practice and whose livelihoods depend on it. The political argument is about influence: traditional chiefs carry significant weight within Liberian communities and with policymakers, which has contributed to the absence of binding legislation years after the original moratorium was first introduced.

V. What these arguments don't answer

Each argument for lifting the bans holds up only if its underlying claim is accepted. Examined against the available evidence, each falls short in the same place: it does not resolve the question of documented harm.

Gambia's type-based argument holds that only Types 2–4 should remain criminalized, with Type 1 permitted as "circumcision." But the World Health Organization classifies all four types, including Type 1, as forms of FGM with no medical benefit and documented health risks (the classification exists precisely to capture variation in severity, not to mark out a harmless category). Narrowing the ban to exclude Type 1 does not remove it from that classification; it exempts a practice the global medical consensus still defines as harmful.

The religious argument, that the practice is supported by hadith, and that banning it infringes religious freedom, does not resolve the harm question either, because it was never a claim about harm. It is a claim about the legitimacy of practice, not about its physical consequences. Framing a harm-reduction law as a religious-freedom violation substitutes one question for another rather than answering the first.

The call to medicalize the practice assumes that performing it under clinical conditions removes its risk. It does not: the WHO and major medical bodies have rejected medicalization because FGM carries no clinical justification and confers no health benefit regardless of who performs it; the harm is inherent to the procedure, not a byproduct of unsafe conditions alone.

Liberia's cultural argument ( that the practice is an initiation rite, not mutilation), is a claim about meaning, not about consequence. The Sande society's role in Liberian identity is not itself in dispute; what the moratorium targets is a specific physical procedure carried out within that structure, which carries the same documented health consequences regardless of the ceremonial context around it. Renaming the procedure does not change what happens to the body.

The economic argument for Zoes is an argument for transition support, not for the practice's safety. Programs offering Zoes alternative income, discussed in Section IV, treat this directly: the harm does not become acceptable because ending it has a cost to those who currently perform it.

The political-influence argument ( that traditional chiefs hold sway over policymakers ), explains why a ban has been difficult to pass or sustain. It is not, itself, an argument that the ban is wrong. It is an account of why enacting it is hard, which is a different claim from whether it should be enacted.

VI. Internal resilience and international engagement

Both cases have been framed, by opponents, as protections imposed rather than chosen. Liberian lawmakers have asked why "our culture" is treated as harmful while other practices are not; Gambia's defense reframes the ban itself as foreign interference in religious life. This framing carries real weight: protections that are seen only as pressure from outside rarely outlast the moment that pressure eases, and it is ultimately the people living under a law who determine whether it survives. But that determination is not made in a vacuum. The harm Section V documents does not disappear because a community is the one deciding whether to keep the protection in place; it is precisely what that decision needs to weigh. A protection upheld by people who have reckoned with the documented harm is different from one upheld or discarded without reference to it at all.

Origin, in any case, is not the same question as endurance. A protection's source ( whether it began as a traditional council's proclamation, a parliamentary act, or a treaty obligation) does not by itself determine whether it survives. What determines that is whether the harm it addresses remains established once the framing around it is stripped away, as Section V showed it does in both cases: neither side disputes that the practice, as legally defined, causes harm; both narrow the definition of what they are defending instead. External scrutiny can widen that view; it can name a harm before local consensus has caught up to it, but it cannot substitute for the protection being understood and upheld from within. That is where both cases now stand. Liberia's moratorium was never passed into law in the first place; Gambia's ban was passed into law and is now being tested in court. Neither the presence nor the absence of legislative origin has, on its own, been enough to secure the protection. What has been missing in both cases is not passage; it's endurance beyond the moment either could be challenged, from within the societies the protection is meant to serve.

VII. The law as ground, not guarantee

Liberia and The Gambia arrived at the same fragility through different routes. One country never passed its protection into law; the other passed it and is now watching a court decide whether it survives. Neither path, on its own, has proven sufficient. A moratorium declared by traditional leaders was never binding enough to outlast a change in position from those same leaders. A statute passed by parliament was never settled enough to close the question of whether it could be undone.

What both cases show is that a protection is not secured at the moment of its adoption; it is tested continuously afterward, by the same actors it constrains. In both countries, those seeking to reverse the protection have not argued that the underlying harm is acceptable; they have argued about where its boundaries lie, or where its origin came from. That is not a sign the debate is settled. It is a sign that it never stopped.

A protection that exists only until it is convenient to lift, or until someone with standing to challenge it does so, was never a guarantee. It was a pause, one that, in Liberia, is set to end on August 15, and in Gambia, waits on a ruling that has not yet come.

Who decides what comes next, in both cases, is not yet settled. That, itself, is the finding.


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