Dr Raslan Fadl and father of the 13-year-old girl who died during cutting are the first to be prosecuted in Egypt for practice of FGM
The Guardian, 14.03.2014
A doctor will stand trial for the first time in Egypt on charges of female genital mutilation, after a 13-year-old girl died following an alleged operation in his clinic last year.
In a landmark case, Dr Raslan Fadl is the first doctor to be prosecuted for FGM in Egypt, where the practice was banned in 2008, but is still widely accepted and carried out by many doctors in private.
Sohair al-Bata’a died in Fadl’s care in June 2013, and her family admitted that she had been victim to an FGM operation carried out at their request.
The case was initially dropped after an official medical report claimed that Sohair had been treated for genital warts, and that she died from an allergic reaction to penicillin. But after a campaign by local rights groups and the international organisation Equality Now, as well as an investigation by Egypt’s state-run National Population Council (NPC), the country’s chief prosecutor agreed to reopen the case – leading to this week’s seminal prosecution of both Fadl and Sohair’s father.
“It is a very important case,” said Hala Youssef, head of the NPC, which had pushed for the case to be reopened. “It’s the first time that somebody in Egypt will be prosecuted for this crime, and it should be a lesson for every clinician. The law is there, and it will be implemented.”