You may know a little bit about this country, but did you know it has perhaps one of the worst dictatorships on the planet? Yeah, that's right. The Gambia's president, Yahya Jammeh has now been in power for around twenty years and with "an iron fist" says Jeffrey Smith of the Robert F. Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights.
The Gambia has been a place of violence and human injustice ever since it's independence from Britain on the 18 February 1965. Mr Jammeh, has led a very repressed and restricted regime ever since he came into power.
Unsurprisingly, there has been another recent but failed coup on the Gambia. In which men of Gambian origin attempted overthrow Mr Jammeh in a violent attack. They are accused of conspiring against a friendly nation and conspiring to possess firearms. But a "friendly nation"? I think not.
Jammeh and his security forces round up people to march from schools and government offices, North Korea-style. And little less than a week ago, the only independent radio station operating in the country that reports on political issues was closed for a third time. People have little access to information, and are without rights to expression or assembly.
Jammeh recently passed an anti-gay law, and even once said publicly "I will kill anyone, who wants to destabilise this country. If you think that you can collaborate with so-called human rights defenders, and get away with it, you must be living in a dream world. I will kill you, and nothing will come out of it."
Last month, Gambia was dropped from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade incentive program established by the Clinton administration in 2000 to provide duty-free access for African goods to the US.
“For the United States to remove The Gambia from that list was very momentous," Smith says. "It was basically based on rampant human rights violations, including rampant torture in the country. ... Yahya Jammeh is the same president who gunned down 14 school children in 2000 who were protesting against his regime."
For all we know, Mr Jammeh is a very dangerous man and one to be aware of. Not only does he commit these crimes against his country on a political level, but also on a personal one.
Article by Lewis Cranston