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In January of this year a couple went to court in Ireland seeking to have their previous convictions for female genital mutilation declared a miscarriage of justice. That might not sound like a story with European significance, but it is, because how this case was handled — and how it unravelled — exposes problems that reach well beyond one Dublin courtroom.
The background is this. In September 2016, two parents originally from a French-speaking part of Africa brought their 21-month-old daughter to a Dublin hospital because she was bleeding from her genitals. They said she’d fallen onto a toy while she wasn’t wearing a nappy. The doctors who examined her weren’t convinced by that explanation and suspected FGM had been carried out.
During the trial, which took place in January 2020, itself raising questions about the right to a speedy trial, expert witnesses described the injury as consistent with what is formally known as Type 1 FGM – removal of the clitoral head and glans – and said it didn’t match the story the parents had given. The jury convicted on both counts. The father received a sentence of five and a half years for FGM and three for child cruelty, and the mother received a sentence of four years and nine months for FGM and two years and nine months for cruelty.
For one brief shining moment it appeared that Ireland had finally, after long years of activists calling for more to be done, secured its first conviction for FGM under the Criminal Justice (Female Genital Mutilation) Act 2012, a law that carries penalties of up to 14 years.
And then, much like a young country girl’s dream of one day becoming an actress, it started to rapidly come totally apart.
In November 2021, the Court of Appeal threw out the convictions after the court found that substantial problems with how testimony was translated had made the original trial unfair.
That alone should give pause. If translation services in an Irish courtroom were so poor that a conviction for a serious criminal offence couldn’t stand, the question has to be asked how often that happens in cases that don’t attract this level of scrutiny.
A retrial in 2023 ended with a hung jury. The DPP then entered a nolle prosequi in 2024, which effectively means the state dropped the case because there wasn’t enough evidence to get a conviction. That’s not the same as saying the couple were innocent, legally speaking, but it is quite a distance from where things stood in 2020.
The couple have applied for a miscarriage of justice certificate, which has been progressing through 2025 and into this year, on the basis of new, and significant, evidence.
Professor Birgitta Essén, a specialise with over 25 years of experience focusing on FGM, physically examined the child in 2023. What Essén found was intact genitalia. A visible clitoris under the prepuce, no scarring, no signs of cutting whatsoever. She classified the anatomy as normal and said it was incompatible with Type 1 or Type 2 FGM, both of which typically leave permanent scarring. The tissue was soft and flexible, which you would not expect to find in an area that had been mutilated.
This wasn’t a lone opinion either. Professor Cecilia Berger, who had been a prosecution expert, also concluded her findings did not support FGM. And a 2019 video examination of the child, which was not disclosed during the original trial, supported the same conclusion. Essén’s view was that the original injury could well have been the accidental trauma the parents described all along.
So we now have a couple convicted of mutilating their child, imprisoned, separated from their family, on the basis of medical testimony that subsequent experts, including one of the prosecution’s own, have contradicted. And a piece of video evidence that wasn’t shown to the jury.
Somewhere in the region of 200 million women and girls have been affected by FGM worldwide, with around half a million in the EU alone either having gone through it or considered at risk. In Ireland, figures from AkiDwA in 2017, estimate the number at 5,790. Belgium, according to data that came up at a European Parliament hearing in 2019, had 4,000 girls at risk. FGM is happening in EU member states to children growing up in European cities.
There’s no single EU law that deals specifically with FGM, and the protections that are in place in broader legislation are uneven to say the least. Eighteen member states have specific FGM laws on the books. Nine don’t have any dedicated criminal provisions for it at all. Reporting requirements for doctors and nurses vary wildly, and specialised support services for victims are patchy or nonexistent depending on where you are.
The ECR Group has been more vocal on this than most, with a large amount of attention being drawn to this issue by the ECR’s Assita Kanko. Kanko, a Burkinabè MEP, herself went through FGM at the age of five. Kanko co-negotiated the new EU Directive on FGM and has been a key player in pushing, consistently, for rules that actually apply uniformly across all member states.
She got a resolution through the European Parliament, backed by six political groups, calling for practical work to be done in this: training people who work with at-risk communities, sharing information across borders, using diplomatic channels to push for zero tolerance. The resolution also made a point that shouldn’t need making but apparently does – FGM isn’t confined to one part of the world. It’s present in Europe and it is happening, or more accurately being done to, European children.
In 2019, MEP Anneleen Van Bossuyt organised a hearing on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM. The group also called for EU money to go into research on surgical reversal and for the whole issue to be elevated to a core policy priority instead of being treated as something that belongs under development aid and nowhere else.
All fair enough. But the Irish case sits awkwardly next to all of this advocacy, because it raises a question about the other end of the process.
If Europe is going to prosecute FGM effectively, and it should do so with gusto, then the evidentiary standards have to be solid. The Irish case is a cautionary example of what happens when they’re not. Medical assessments led to a conviction despite the fact that subsequent expert review, including by the prosecution’s own specialist, contradicted those assessments. Video evidence that should have been before the jury wasn’t. Translation failures compromised the fairness of the trial itself.
Failures to ensure fair trials threaten our ability to deal with these matters through the court at all.
Put simply, European Courts must now deal with an intensely culturally sensitive practice, which certain people will seek to defend and/or normalise, and which is nearly entirely found amongst migrants from particular reasons – opening the possibility of political or cultural resistance to stricter legal oversight on racial discrimination grounds. Systems must be efficient, rigorous, and fair in order to ensure that successful prosecutions are covered in every sense.
Getting convictions is important. Getting them right is of critical important. And if the ECR’s work on harmonising protections across the EU is going to mean anything in practice, it has to include consistent evidentiary standards and genuine reliance on internationally recognised expertise, not just tougher laws on paper.