The Gambia’s first blind magistrate tests a system built for the sighted

Banjul, the Gambia – It is still early when Magistrate Muhammed Krubally arrives at the Banjul Magistrates’ Court.

Before the first case, his clerk goes over the day’s proceedings, running through the files and making sure everything is in place. Krubally listens, asks questions, and prepares to preside.

Then he enters a packed courtroom, where lawyers, witnesses and relatives have gathered for a criminal case.

The room falls quiet.

Krubally cannot see the people before him, but he can hear them. A lawyer rises. A witness speaks. Papers move across the room. His clerk is nearby.

At his desk, his computer speaks back to him.

Krubally uses JAWS, or Job Access With Speech, a screen reader that allows him to navigate his computer and read documents and judgements.

“This makes my job very easy,” he tells Al Jazeera.

He also uses AI-enabled smart glasses to access information and carry out tasks independently.

But technology is only part of how he works.

He listens for voices, remembers details and follows the rhythm of proceedings, building a picture of the courtroom through sound. When necessary, he relies on his clerk.

At 41, Krubally says he has presided over more than 1,000 civil and criminal cases since joining the bench.

In 2016, he became the Gambia’s first visually impaired magistrate. The Gambia Organisation of the Visually Impaired (GOVI) identifies him as the country’s first person with a visual impairment to hold the position.

For Krubally, this is not an experiment in what a visually impaired person might be capable of doing.

It is his profession.

And he has spent a decade doing it.

A determination shaped early

Long before he took his place on the bench, Krubally grew up in a village in the Gambia’s Central River Region, the second of nine children.

From an early age, he wanted to become a lawyer. Part of that ambition was personal: he wanted to defend his own rights. But he also wanted to advocate for others.

He wanted, he says, “to be the voice for the voiceless”, particularly people with disabilities.

The path was not straightforward.

From primary school through university, Krubally encountered limited resources and an education system that often left visually impaired students like him facing obstacles their sighted classmates did not.

He remembers being discouraged by fellow students and some teachers from pursuing the education he wanted.

Instead of making him abandon his ambition, he says, their doubts only strengthened it.

“Their discouragement kept me going. I knew what I wanted, and see where I am now,” he says.

Those experiences later shaped his decision to enter the judiciary.

“I became a magistrate to change the system, to make it inclusive,” he says.

But joining one of the country’s most important public institutions did not make those barriers disappear.

Rights on paper, barriers in practice

The Gambia’s Persons with Disabilities Act, passed in 2021, sets out principles including independence, non-discrimination, full participation, equality of opportunity and accessibility.

The law also contains provisions covering employment, public buildings and services, information and access to justice.

Yet putting those rights into practice remains a challenge.

The National Human Rights Commission has identified barriers affecting people with disabilities, including discrimination and difficulties accessing services, education and employment.

Al Jazeera contacted the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Welfare for a response on implementation of the act, including measures to improve accessibility, education and employment opportunities for people with disabilities. The ministry did not respond.

Krubally encounters those challenges not only as a judicial officer, but also as an advocate.

As president of the Gambia Federation of the Disabled, he speaks at events in the Gambia and beyond, pressing for greater recognition of the rights and potential of people with disabilities.

“I want to see a world for all; inclusion matters,” he says.

For Krubally, inclusion is not simply about opening the door. It is about having the means to participate once inside.

The barriers begin at school

For many people with disabilities, working towards full inclusion begins long before they enter a courtroom or parliament.

It begins at school.

Today, GOVI’s Resource Centre for the Blind provides specialist education for children with visual impairments before they transition into mainstream schools.

Forty-nine pupils aged between four and 14 currently attend the centre, Lamin Colley, its head of school, told Al Jazeera.

After completing their studies there, pupils are expected to enter mainstream schools, where special-needs teachers stationed across school clusters are meant to support them.

But that support is stretched.

Colley told Al Jazeera that limited learning materials and the size of the school clusters are putting pressure on the support available to students. A single special-needs teacher, he said, cannot maintain regular contact with all students across those clusters.

“The reality on the ground is that not much has changed after the disability act has been passed,” Colley says.

He attributes this partly to what he describes as insufficient government funding for disability issues in the national budget.

Colley remembers Krubally as a pupil who loved to read and could often be found in the library. He also remembers his determination to participate in activities alongside his sighted classmates.

Years later, Krubally’s journey carries a message beyond the school gates.

“Disability does not mean inability.”

But one person’s achievement does not erase the obstacles facing those coming behind him.

Entering an institution is not enough

Ndey Yassin Secka-Sallah knows what it means to enter a public institution without having the tools to participate independently.

She was nominated to the Gambia’s National Assembly and has long advocated for the rights of people with disabilities. GOVI describes her as the country’s only visually impaired parliamentarian.

She was also involved in advocacy around disability rights and the push for stronger legal protections.

Yet taking a seat in parliament did not make the institution accessible.

“I used to depend on my fellow colleagues to know what was being discussed,” she told Al Jazeera.

What she wanted was not special treatment, but independence.

“I would have loved to be independent, without depending on people for help.”

Five years after the disability law was passed, Secka-Sallah says implementation remains a major challenge.

She sees Krubally’s appointment to the bench as significant, but not as the end of the struggle.

“Inclusion is all we wish for,” she says.

Musa Barrow, another visually impaired professional, teaches media law and ethics to journalism students.

Like Krubally, Barrow has encountered assumptions about what a visually impaired person can do. Some students have questioned whether he can meet the standards they expect from a lecturer.

Technology has helped him work independently. He uses digital tools to read, write and prepare lecture notes.

“Technology has broken that barrier for me,” he says.

But students’ assumptions have not disappeared.

His response is direct.

“I can do more than what sighted people can do,” he says.

Barrow’s visual impairment has also shaped how he teaches journalism, particularly when discussing the media’s portrayal of disability.

The experiences of Krubally, Secka-Sallah and Barrow all point to the same gap: entering an institution is not the same as being equipped to participate fully in it.

What does the law look like in practice?

The scale of the challenge is difficult to measure.

The Gambia’s 2013 Population and Housing Census recorded a disability prevalence of 1.2 percent, representing 21,873 people, according to later analysis of the census data.

But that figure may understate the scale of disability in the country. The census used a narrower set of questions and did not use the Washington Group questions commonly used to measure functional difficulties.

The Gambia has since conducted a new population and housing census, with preliminary results released in September 2024. But the preliminary report did not include detailed updated national disability data.

That leaves an incomplete picture of how the country’s disability landscape may have changed over the past decade.

What is clearer is the experience of people navigating institutions that were not designed with them in mind: a parliamentarian depending on colleagues to follow proceedings, a lecturer being questioned about his ability to teach, or children entering mainstream schools with limited specialist support.

Krubally knows that journey personally.

He now mentors young people, many of them visually impaired. One is Modou Lamin Dampha, who describes Krubally as someone who encourages him to keep pursuing his ambitions.

“He advises and encourages me to keep going, that things are possible,” Dampha says.

For Dampha, Krubally is more than a magistrate.

He is evidence that professional ambition does not have to end with disability.

Has the courtroom changed?

Back inside the Banjul Magistrates’ Court, the case continues.

Krubally listens as the proceedings unfold, using voices, memory, technology and experience to follow what is happening before him.

His career raises a harder question: how much has the system itself changed?

The judiciary was asked what accommodations are available to Krubally, what accessibility measures are in place for judicial officers and court users with disabilities, and what changes it has made since the Persons with Disabilities Act was passed.

It did not respond by the time of publication.

Krubally has spent a decade adapting to the demands of the courtroom.

Whether the institution around him has also adapted remains an open question.

Asked what he sees when he looks to the future, Krubally says it is not about the obstacles he has overcome.

“All I see is possibility.”