A Russian human rights NGO has called for prosecution of a predominantly Muslim Russian Caucasian clinic after the forced excision of a 9-year-old girl. "We lodged a complaint with the Investigation Committee on May 12" against the Aïbolit medical center, situated in Magas, capital of the Russian Caucasian republic of Ingushetia, Tatiana Savvina, a lawyer for the NGO Justice Initiative (SJI, Stichting Justice Initiative).
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Founded in 2000 to deal with human rights violations in the Russian Caucasus, the NGO requests an investigation into the activities of this medical center which it accuses of carrying out "mutilating operations on the female genital organs".
The regional branch of the Russian Investigative Committee (the main body responsible for criminal investigations in the country) confirmed to AFP that it had received the complaint, its spokesperson, Zurab Guerayev, having however specified that "no decision 'was taken for the moment'.
At the origin of the complaint, the forced excision of a 9-year-old girl, brought to the Aïbolit medical center at the request of her father by her stepmother, and against the will of the mother, according to long.
According to the grandmother of the girl quoted by the local information site Daptar, the mother, whose name is not revealed, lives in neighboring Chechnya after having divorced with the father of her child. But she left him with the little girl for a few days, which ended in drama.
During the procedure, the doctors held the crying girl by the legs and her mother-in-law by the arms, said the grandmother. The doctor who examined her when she returned home discovered a sore on her clitoris.
An investigation against the clinic's gynecologist, Izania Nalguïeva, who performed the intervention, was opened in July 2019 and a trial against her is already underway. This is the first trial in Russia for excision, the Russian Criminal Code providing for no punishment for this kind of operation.
According to a report from the NGO SJI produced in 2018, each year some 1,240 girls under the age of twelve are circumcised in Muslim families in the North Caucasus.
