Gambia’s parliament has voted to uphold a landmark law that bans female genital mutilation (FGM) in the largely Muslim nation after religious groups pushed for the legislation to be repealed.

If Monday’s bid had been successful, the tiny West African country would have been the first in the world to relegalise FGM after criminalising it.

MP Amadou Camara, who chairs a joint health and gender committee that recommended that FGM should remain outlawed, told CNN that none of the clauses seeking the repeal of the ban in the Women’s (Amendment) Bill 2024 was passed.

Parliament Speaker Fabakary Jatta ruled that it was “impossible” for the bill, which passed a second reading four months ago, to be read a third time and to pass without those clauses.

“I so rule that the bill is rejected, and the legislative process exhausted,” Jatta said at a plenary meeting Monday.

FGM was prohibited in Gambia in 2015 by former president Yahya Jammeh who authorised the imposition of fines and prison sentences of up to three years for individuals who engaged in it.

The law also punished perpetrators with life sentences in cases where the practice led to death.

Pro-Islamic groups and lawmakers pushed back against the criminalisation, saying that female circumcision was “one of the virtues of Islam.”

Other prominent Gambians, such as opposition leader and former interior minister Mai Ahmad Fatty also defended the practice, arguing that: “There is no FGM in Gambia. We circumcise, not mutilate.”

Human rights organisation Amnesty International earlier described efforts to revoke the FGM ban as a “backward move” for the protection of human rights in the country.

In Gambia, 73% of women aged between 15 and 49 years had experienced FGM as of 2020, according to the United Nations.

More than 65% of those women were subjected to the practice “before the age of five years,” the UN said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Women’s Day in March that he was “outraged” by moves by Gambia’s parliament to legalize FGM, describing the practice as “horrific.”

Despite the ban, FGM has still been performed on children in parts of the country. Last year, three women were convicted of performing the practice on eight female minors and ordered to pay fines of around 15,000 Gambian Dalasi ($220) each or face a one-year jail sentence.

The penalties were reported to have been paid by an Islamic cleric.

In 2016, two women also faced charges after a 5-month-old girl died from genital mutilation.