Gambia's First Blind Magistrate Shows Courts Still Lag Behind Disability Law

Each working day, Magistrate Muhammed Krubally arrives early at the Banjul Magistrates' Court, where his clerk walks him through the day's files before the first case begins. Krubally listens, asks questions and then enters a packed courtroom to preside over a criminal matter. He cannot see the lawyers, witnesses and relatives gathered before him, but he can hear them.

At his desk, a screen reader called JAWS, short for Job Access With Speech, reads documents and judgements aloud to him. "This makes my job very easy," he told Al Jazeera. He also uses AI-enabled smart glasses to get information and complete tasks on his own. Yet he says technology is only part of the picture. He follows voices, remembers details and tracks the rhythm of proceedings, and he turns to his clerk when necessary.

Krubally is 41 and says he has handled more than 1,000 civil and criminal cases since joining the bench. In 2016 he became the Gambia's first visually impaired magistrate, a distinction confirmed by the Gambia Organisation of the Visually Impaired (GOVI). He describes the work not as an experiment but as his profession.

He grew up in a village in the Central River Region, the second of nine children, and wanted to be a lawyer from an early age. Part of the motivation was defending his own rights, but he also wanted to be "the voice for the voiceless", particularly for people with disabilities. From primary school to university he faced limited resources and an education system that placed obstacles in front of visually impaired students. Some classmates and teachers discouraged him. "Their discouragement kept me going," he said. He became a magistrate, he added, "to change the system, to make it inclusive."

The Gambia passed its Persons with Disabilities Act in 2021, setting out principles such as non-discrimination, equality of opportunity and accessibility, with provisions on employment, public buildings, information and access to justice. The National Human Rights Commission has nonetheless identified continuing barriers, including discrimination and difficulty reaching services, education and jobs. Al Jazeera asked the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Welfare about implementation, but received no response.

Barriers often start in school. GOVI's Resource Centre for the Blind currently teaches 49 pupils aged four to 14 before they move into mainstream schools, said head of school Lamin Colley. There, special-needs teachers assigned to school clusters are meant to support them, but Colley said limited learning materials and the size of the clusters stretch that support thin, since one teacher cannot keep regular contact with every student. "Not much has changed after the disability act has been passed," he said, blaming in part insufficient government funding in the national budget.

Others describe a similar gap. Ndey Yassin Secka-Sallah, nominated to the National Assembly and described by GOVI as the country's only visually impaired parliamentarian, said she had to rely on colleagues to know what was being discussed. "I would have loved to be independent," she said. Musa Barrow, who teaches media law and ethics to journalism students, uses digital tools to read, write and prepare lectures. Some students have questioned whether he can meet their standards, and he answers that he can "do more than what sighted people can do."

The scale of the issue is hard to measure. The 2013 census recorded a disability prevalence of 1.2 percent, or 21,873 people, but it used a narrower set of questions than the Washington Group questions commonly used to gauge functional difficulty, so the figure may understate reality. Preliminary results of a newer census, released in September 2024, did not include detailed national disability data.

Krubally now mentors young people, many of them visually impaired, including Modou Lamin Dampha, who says the magistrate encourages him to keep going. The judiciary did not respond to questions about what accommodations exist for Krubally or what it has changed since the 2021 law. Whether the institution has adapted alongside him remains open. Looking ahead, Krubally says simply: "All I see is possibility."