States have obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of women and girls by eliminating harmful practices.

The practice of FGM violates a series of well established human rights principles, norms and standards, including the principles of equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex, the right to life (when the procedure results in death), and the right to freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, as well as the rights of the child to physical and mental integrity (25). Since FGM interferes with healthy genital tissue in the absence of medical necessity and can lead to severe consequences for a woman’s physical and mental health, it is also a violation of a person’s right to the highest attainable standard of health. A variety of human rights treaties and agreements have also pronounced FGM to be a manifestation of violence against women and girls, and a practice that sustains unequal gender norms and stereotypes that contravene human rights.

 Human rights treaty monitoring bodies have consistently made it clear that harmful practices like FGM constitute a form of discrimination based on sex, gender, age and other grounds. Several regional human rights agreements have also taken up the issue, especially the 2003 Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (“the Maputo Protocol”), which mandates legal prohibition of harmful practices such as FGM. The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) called for an end to the practice, as have a variety of other United Nations human rights treaty monitoring bodies, calling on Member States that are party to those agreements to comply with their obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of women and girls and to take action to ensure that women and girls can live free from harmful practices, such as FGM.

 - RESPECT - States must enact legislative measures to prohibit the practice of FGM. For example, States should not support the medicalization of FGM and should discourage medical personnel from performing this practice. 

- PROTECT - States must prevent violations committed by private individuals and organizations. To this end, States must provide protection to girls running away from their families to avoid forced marriage or being subjected to FGM. Appropriate measures could include the establishment of temporary shelters and relocation of at-risk girls outside their immediate community, but must not result in their arbitrary detention. 

- FULFIL - States must take appropriate legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial and other actions and establish “a well-defined, rights-based and locally-relevant holistic strategy which includes supportive legal and policy measures, including social measures that are combined with a commensurate political commitment and accountability at all levels” . This requires deliberate measures to address root causes of harmful practices, which include harmful gender stereotypes, poverty and lack of education.