The Undermined Social Pain: Female Genital Mutilation in Broken Lens of Ethiopian Criminal Law

Abstract

The target of this article is to appraise the (un)suitability of Ethiopian criminal law design to halt the prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Ethiopia. Since practicing FGM has no any health benefit, plethora of international as well as regional treaties, and also domestic legislations of different jurisdictions years ago framed it as a gender based human rights violation. Ethiopia is one of those jurisdictions which have attempted to eliminate the prevalence of FGM by outlawing its practice.  It criminalized FGM as one of crimes against person and health under penal code of 1957 whilst as one of crimes of harmful traditional practices (HTPs) under criminal code of 2004. Regarding its punishment, per the latter code, the punishment of  FGM crime, as one crime of HTPs,  goes up to  a maximum five year rigorous imprisonment, while had it been one of crimes against person and health, its punishment should have gone up to a maximum of  15 years rigorous imprisonment. All the same, either failure to treat FGM as one of crimes against person and health or making it a more severe crime, compared to crimes against person and health, represents the fallacy of treating female genital as it is not part of human body. Moreover, attaching less lenient punishment to FGM crime, compared to crimes against person and health, does not serve the very purpose of criminalizing it. Consequently, the author argues practicing FGM should not be one of crimes of HTPs rather one of crimes against person and health in Ethiopian law. In so doing, doctrinal research method is employed to attain the target of this article.