This joint stakeholder report focuses on key issues relating to human rights in the digital context in The Gambia, including digital connectivity and inclusion, freedom of speech and expression online, privacy and data protection, cybersecurity and cybercrime, access to information, and technology-facilitated gender-based violence, particularly its impact on human and women’s rights defenders. The report draws on extensive and ongoing monitoring of the situation of human rights online in The Gambia by a number of civil society organisations and a desk review. It also draws on inputs received during a stakeholders’ consultation on digital rights in The Gambia, which was organised by Jokkolabs Banjul.
This review marks the fourth cycle for The Gambia in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism. During the third cycle, the importance of issues relating to freedom of speech and expression, access to information, data privacy and freedom of the press was demonstrated by The Gambia receiving 20 recommendations related to these issues, including 14 relating to free speech and expression (with a focus on the need to amend the Constitution and other legislative provisions which unduly restricted free speech), two recommendations relating to access to information, including to adopt the Freedom of Information Bill, one recommendation relating to data privacy and protection, and three recommendations relating to protecting journalists and human rights defenders from attacks and intimidation. Commendably, the government of The Gambia accepted all of these recommendations.