CNN
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Gambia’s parliament has voted to uphold a landmark legislation that bans feminine genital mutilation (FGM) within the largely Muslim nation, after spiritual teams pushed for the laws to be repealed.

If Monday’s bid had been profitable, the tiny West African nation would have been the primary on the planet to relegalize FGM after criminalizing it.

MP Amadou Camara, who chairs a joint well being and gender committee that really helpful that FGM ought to stay outlawed, informed CNN that not one of the clauses in search of the repeal of the ban within the Ladies’s (Modification) Invoice 2024 was handed.

The observe was prohibited in Gambia in 2015 by former president Yahya Jammeh who approved the imposition of fines and jail sentences of as much as three years for people who engaged in it.

The legislation additionally punished perpetrators with life sentences in circumstances the place the observe led to loss of life.

Professional-Islamic teams and lawmakers pushed again in opposition to the criminalization, saying that feminine circumcision was “one of many virtues of Islam.”

Different outstanding Gambians, resembling opposition chief and former inside minister Mai Ahmad Fatty additionally defended the observe, arguing that: “There is no such thing as a FGM in Gambia. We circumcise, not mutilate.”

Human rights group Amnesty Worldwide earlier described efforts to revoke the FGM ban as a “backward transfer” for the safety of human rights within the nation. In Gambia, 73% of ladies aged between 15 and 49 years had skilled FGM as of 2020, in accordance to the United Nations.

Greater than 65% of these girls had been subjected to the observe “earlier than the age of 5 years,” the UN stated.

UN Secretary-Normal Antonio Guterres stated on Ladies’s Day in March that he was “outraged” by strikes by Gambia’s parliament to legalize FGM, describing the observe as “horrific.”

Regardless of the ban, FGM has nonetheless been carried out on youngsters in components of the nation. Final 12 months, three girls had been convicted of performing the observe on eight feminine minors and ordered to pay fines of round 15,000 Gambian Dalasi ($220) every or face a one-year jail sentence. The penalties had been reported to have been paid by an Islamic cleric.

In 2016, two girls additionally confronted prices after a 5-month-old lady died from genital mutilation.