A combined LLM teaching note covering three topics of the human rights module: the national institutions that protect and promote rights, the domestic jurisprudence on fundamental rights, and the challenges that remain.
FACULTY OF LAW
FOURAH BAY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF SIERRA LEONE
LLM IN HUMAN RIGHTS, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Module: Human Rights in the Global, Regional and National Context COMPREHENSIVE COURSE NOTE The Protection and Promotion of Human Rights in Sierra Leone Institutions, Domestic Jurisprudence, National Challenges and the 2025 Constitutional Reforms A combined teaching note covering Topics 2, 3 and 4 of the second semester (2026), consolidating the circulated lecture notes with the oral lecture delivery, and extending the material through further research.
Prepared for LLM Year One students Second Semester, 2026 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART ONE: INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE 1.1 The architecture of the module 1.2 Sources, method and how transcript material is marked 1.3 The constitutional foundation of rights protection PART TWO: THE ROLE OF KEY INSTITUTIONS 2.1 Why institutions, and the question of hierarchy 2.2 The Office of the President 2.3 The Parliament of Sierra Leone 2.4 The Judiciary of Sierra Leone 2.5 The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone 2.6 The Legal Aid Board of Sierra Leone 2.7 The Office of the Ombudsman 2.8 The Sierra Leone Police 2.9 Non-governmental institutions: the Bar Association, LEGAL LINK, CARL and LAWYERS 2.10 The limits on the State’s human rights obligations 2.11 Critical assessment of the institutional framework PART THREE: DOMESTIC HUMAN RIGHTS CASE LAW JURISPRUDENCE 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Marrah v Inspector-General of Police (2022)
3.3 Pratt v Senesie (2025)
3.4 Kabbah v Firetex (SL) Ltd (1996)
3.5 The Bumbuna Inquiry of the Human Rights Commission 3.6 Sam-Sumana v Attorney-General (2015) and the ECOWAS Court ruling (2017)
3.7 Critical assessment: what the jurisprudence shows and where it stops PART FOUR: CHALLENGES IN PROTECTION AND PROMOTION 4.1 Introduction 4.2 A weak and an under-resourced judiciary 4.3 Limited access to justice 4.4 Gender-based discrimination and violence 4.5 Child rights violations 4.6 The rights of persons with disabilities 4.7 Poverty and inequality 4.8 Corruption and poor governance 4.9 Freedom of expression and assembly, and the policing of protest 4.10 Customary practice against national and international law 4.11 The post-conflict legacy and trauma 4.12 Weak national human rights institutions 4.13 Inadequate data, monitoring and the protection of defenders 4.14 Critical assessment: the common denominator PART FIVE: CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM AND THE FUTURE OF RIGHTS PROTECTION 5.1 The Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill 2025: origins and process 5.2 Clause-by-clause analysis: the positives, the negatives and a recommendation 5.3 One omnibus Bill or many, and the amendment pathway 5.4 The overall position of the class PART SIX: GENERAL CONCLUSION PART SEVEN: EXAMINATION AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS WITH MODEL ANSWERS 7.1 Questions put by the lecturer 7.2 Further questions for revision PART EIGHT: GROUP PREPARATION POINTERS PART ONE: INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE 1.1 The architecture of the module This note pulls three connected topics of the second semester into a single study document. Topic 2 asks which institutions carry the work of protecting and promoting human rights in Sierra Leone. Topic 3 asks how well those institutions have actually performed, read through the decided cases and inquiries in which rights were vindicated. Topic 4 asks where the whole enterprise still fails. Taken together they form one argument rather than three: the country has built a reasonably complete set of institutions on paper (Topic 2); a small but growing body of cases shows those institutions can bite (Topic 3); and yet the ordinary experience of most citizens is shaped by the failures catalogued in Topic 4. A student who can hold the three together, and can say why the gap between the paper architecture and the lived reality persists, has understood the module.
A fourth strand runs underneath all three. During the lecture the class spent a long stretch on the constitutional reforms then before Parliament, the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025. Those reforms matter for rights protection because they touch how power is won and transferred, how the electoral umpire is chosen, how women enter public life, and how a sitting Vice-President can be removed. Part Five works through them clause by clause because the lecturer set that analysis as the central preparation task for the class.
1.2 Sources, method and how transcript material is marked
The backbone of this note is the set of lecture notes circulated by the lecturer for Topics 2, 3 and 4. That circulated text is reproduced in substance and then built upon. The building material is of two kinds. The first is the oral lecture itself, captured in a student transcript, which contains a good deal that the circulated note leaves out: the ranking of institutions by importance, the fuller account of the President’s powers, the argument for a dedicated human rights court, the treatment of the Sam-Sumana litigation, the policing of protest, the limits a State may plead against its rights obligations, and the whole reform exercise. The second is further research carried out to verify authorities and to add examples and questions.
Because the reader asked to be able to tell the two apart, every stretch of this note that comes from the oral lecture rather than the circulated text is flagged. Where a whole subsection is transcript-derived, it opens with a short italic line saying so. Where a transcript point is added inside a subsection that otherwise follows the circulated note, a footnote records that the point was made orally in the lecture and is not in the circulated note. Material introduced purely by way of further research is footnoted to its source in the ordinary way. Nothing has been invented: where a Sierra Leonean authority could not be verified to the level of a section number or a citation, the note says so rather than guessing.
1.3 The constitutional foundation of rights protection
Every institution and every case in this note draws its authority from one place: Chapter III of the Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, which sets out the fundamental human rights and freedoms of the individual in sections 15 to 29. Section 15 opens the chapter by recognising that every person in Sierra Leone is entitled to the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual, subject to respect for the rights of others and for the public interest. The substantive guarantees follow: life, personal liberty, protection from deprivation of property, privacy of the home, a fair hearing, conscience and religion, expression, assembly and association, freedom of movement, and freedom from discrimination.
Two provisions convert those guarantees from statements of aspiration into enforceable law. Section 28 gives any person who alleges that a Chapter III right has been, is being, or is likely to be contravened the right to apply to the Supreme Court for redress, and gives the Supreme Court original to hear the application and to make binding orders. Section 171(15) then makes the Constitution the supreme law, so that any other law inconsistent with it is void to the extent of the inconsistency.
These are the hinges on which Part Three turns: when the Supreme Court in Marrah struck down a police pronouncement, or in Pratt held that the State could not walk onto titled land, it was section 28 that opened the door and section 171(15) that supplied the remedy.
One more feature of the constitutional scheme should be fixed at the outset because it recurs throughout the note. Sierra Leone is dualist. A treaty that the State ratifies does not by that act become part of domestic law; it must be domesticated by an Act of Parliament before a Sierra Leonean court will enforce it directly. This is why the Human Rights Commission spends part of its energy pressing for domestication, why civil society litigates to close the gap, and why the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, applying the African Charter directly, could reach a conclusion in the Sam-Sumana matter that the domestic courts had not.
PART TWO: THE ROLE OF KEY INSTITUTIONS IN THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
2.1 Why institutions, and the question of hierarchy
Rights that no one is charged with protecting are rights in name only. Sierra Leone has therefore distributed the duty of protecting and promoting human rights across a set of State and non-State institutions, each with its own mandate, powers and limits. The circulated note lists these institutions and explains the role of each. The lecture added a demand that the circulated note does not make: that the institutions be ranked in their order of importance, and that a student be able to defend the ranking. This subsection draws on the oral lecture and is not part of the circulated note. The lecturer’s order was: President, Parliament, Judiciary, Human Rights Commission, Legal Aid Board, Ombudsman, Police, and then civil society and the Bar.
The ranking is defensible on a simple test: how much of the rights architecture would collapse if the institution failed. Put the President first because the office sets the tone for the whole system, controls the security forces, declares emergencies, and either honours or hollows out every treaty the country signs. Put Parliament second because without its laws the courts have nothing to apply and no rights instrument is domesticated. Put the Judiciary third because it is where an aggrieved person actually obtains a remedy, and where the acts of the first two can be declared invalid. The Commission, the Legal Aid Board, the Ombudsman and the Police follow as specialised bodies, powerful within their fields but narrower in reach. The non-State institutions come last not because they matter least in practice, where they often carry the heaviest load, but because they hold no coercive constitutional power and depend on the State institutions to give their advocacy effect. A student is free to contest the order; what the lecturer wanted was the argument, not the list.
The order also carries a warning that runs through Part Four. The same office that ranks first as a protector, the Presidency, commands the security forces that are most often accused of violating rights; the Police that rank near the top as guardians of assembly are the body most frequently named as the abuser of it. Ranking by importance is therefore also ranking by the capacity to do harm, and the two readings should be held together.
2.2 The Office of the President
In Sierra Leone the Office of the President carries the ultimate responsibility for the promotion and protection of human rights. Section 40 of the Constitution makes the President the Head of State, the supreme executive authority of the Republic, and the guardian of the Constitution. In that last capacity the office is expected to set the national tone on rights, and it does so through the ordinary instruments of executive power: formulating policy, executing and pressing for the ratification of human rights treaties, and establishing the national institutions, the Commission chief among them, through which rights are protected. The President is also the officer to whom the Human Rights Commission submits its annual report on the State of Human Rights in Sierra Leone, and who is expected to act on and give directives to implement its recommendations.
The lecture drew out how wide the President’s constitutional powers run, and insisted that each of them connects back to human rights rather than standing apart from it.
(a) Supreme executive authority. The President is the chief executive and holds the supreme executive authority of the State, which carries the power to appoint and to remove Ministers and other public officers. That power decides who administers the rights-affecting arms of government day to day. (b) Commander-in-Chief. The President is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Command of the security forces is the sharpest of the rights powers, because those forces both secure the conditions in which rights are enjoyed and, if misused, destroy them. (c) The prerogative of mercy. The President may grant a pardon or reprieve to a person of an offence, a power that can be used to save a life or to correct an injustice after the courts have finished.
(d) The power to declare a state of public emergency. The President may declare a state of public emergency, which is the moment at which the ordinary enjoyment of rights can lawfully be curtailed, and therefore the moment at which the guardian role is most severely tested. (e) The fountain of honour. The President confers national honours and awards on those who have served the country, which is the ceremonial face of the office. (f) Appointments and external relations. The President appoints judges, ambassadors and other senior officers and conducts the country’s international relations, including the treaty-making that, once ratified by Parliament, brings human rights instruments toward domestic effect. The through-line the lecturer pressed is that none of these powers is neutral: each can be exercised to protect rights or to erode them, and the office is judged by which it does. A President who declares emergencies sparingly, pardons to prevent injustice, keeps the security forces under lawful command, and acts on the Commission’s reports is discharging the guardian role; one who does the opposite abuses it.
2.3 The Parliament of Sierra Leone
Parliament is the supreme law-making body of the Republic under section 73 of the Constitution, and its contribution to human rights runs through that law-making power. Two functions carry most of the weight. The first is legislation. Parliament enacts the statutes that safeguard individual liberties and that address the structural problems, from gender-based violence to child protection, that left alone would erode rights; and it is Parliament that ratifies and domesticates the international and regional instruments the country signs, which in a dualist system is the step that gives those instruments domestic force. Without that step a treaty binds the State abroad but changes nothing in a Freetown courtroom. The second function is oversight. Under section 93 Parliament can inquire into the activities of State institutions and hold them to their human rights obligations, and the parliamentary oversight committee on human rights has been used over the years to scrutinise government policies and actions that undermine rights. The lecture added the reminder that law-making is a double-edged function. Parliament can make the good laws that further rights, but it can equally pass laws that narrow them, so the quality of scrutiny at the enacting stage is itself a rights safeguard. Part Four returns to this with the example of cybercrime legislation used to silence critics: a statute passed by Parliament can become the instrument of the very abuse the institution exists to prevent, which is why the oversight function and the law-making function have to be read together.
2.4 The Judiciary of Sierra Leone
The Judiciary interprets the law and decides disputes, and as an independent branch it is where the rule of law is enforced and where an individual actually obtains a remedy for a violation. Section 120 vests judicial power in the Judiciary and guarantees its independence. The primary rights function is to interpret and apply the law consistently with the country’s constitutional and international human rights standards, and through landmark rulings to set precedents that reinforce protection. The circulated note points to Augustine Sorie-Sengbe Marrah v Inspector-General of Police as the instructive example, and Part Three examines it in full. The mechanism that makes all this possible is section 28, which lets any person who alleges a Chapter III violation apply to the Supreme Court for redress, read with the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction over the interpretation and enforcement of the Constitution.
The lecture developed three points about the Judiciary that the circulated note does not contain, and they matter for anyone thinking about reform. (a) The Supreme Court has been captured by political litigation. Because the Supreme Court holds the constitutional jurisdiction, election petitions, disputes over office, and party-political questions crowd its list, and the ordinary human rights matters of ordinary people are pushed to the margins. The court that should be the apex protector of rights spends much of its time on the contests of the powerful. (b) The case for a dedicated human rights court or division. The lecturer’s own proposal, which he says he has written about, is to create a specialised human rights court, or at least a human rights division of the High Court, so that a person alleging a violation has a first-instance forum built for the purpose, with appeal upward, rather than being forced to reach the Supreme Court directly or to shelter a rights claim inside an ordinary civil or criminal action. A dedicated forum would build expertise, clear a distinct list, and give rights litigation a settled home. (c) The Supreme Court alone may depart from its own decisions. As the final court, the Supreme Court is not bound to follow its own previous decisions and may depart from them when it appears right to do so, a latitude no lower court enjoys. That latitude is what allows the apex court to correct its own errors over time, and it featured in the lecture’s treatment of the Sam-Sumana litigation.
The lecture also noted the executive route into the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisdiction: where a genuine question of constitutional interpretation is contested, it can be brought to the Supreme Court for an authoritative answer rather than left to be fought out politically. The lecturer’s point, made against the Sam-Sumana background, was that a President faced with a genuinely uncertain constitutional question is better served by seeking the court’s interpretation first than by acting and litigating afterwards.
2.5 The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone
The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone is the national human rights institution and the body whose central purpose is to protect and promote rights across the country. It was established by the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone Act, Act No 9 of 2004, passed by Parliament on 30 July 2004, and it began effective operations in 2007. The Commission is an independent State institution, a status meant to keep it free of the influence of the government it is charged with holding to account.
Its functions cluster around four tasks. It investigates complaints of human rights violations and abuses, which lets victims obtain redress and holds perpetrators, including State actors, to account. It runs public education campaigns to raise awareness of rights. It collaborates with civil society and other stakeholders to monitor compliance and to press for legal and policy reform. And it publishes the annual report on the State of Human Rights in Sierra Leone and advises the State on meeting its international and regional obligations. The lecture stressed the quasi-judicial edge to the first of these: the Commission is not merely advisory but can receive and determine complaints, compel attendance and the production of information, and issue findings that carry weight against the State and, in principle, against private and business actors who abuse rights. 2.6 The Legal Aid Board of Sierra Leone The Legal Aid Board was established under section 2 of the Legal Aid Act 2012, and its work is the practical guarantee of a right that would otherwise be theoretical for most people: access to legal representation. Representation before a court is itself a component of the fair-hearing right, yet in Sierra Leone the cost of a lawyer and the scarcity of lawyers outside Freetown put it beyond the reach of the poor and of marginalised communities. Since 2012 the Board has narrowed that gap by providing free legal assistance to indigent persons, so that they too have access to legal services. It runs outreach programmes to educate vulnerable people and communities about their rights and the services available to them, and it works with the Judiciary to streamline processes, decongest the correctional centres, and reduce the backlog of cases. The Sierra Leonean model is notable for using paralegals alongside lawyers to extend reach into communities that no lawyer serves, which is part of why the Board features in Part Four as one of the few partial answers to the access-to-justice problem.
2.7 The Office of the Ombudsman
This subsection draws on the oral lecture and is not part of the circulated note. The lecturer treated the Ombudsman as a distinct institution in the protective architecture; the circulated note does not list it.
The Office of the Ombudsman investigates complaints of in public administration: unfairness, abuse of office, undue delay and improper conduct by public bodies and officials. It sits alongside the Commission as a second complaints avenue, but aimed at the fairness of administration rather than at Chapter III violations as such. Where a citizen is wronged by the ordinary machinery of the State, not through a dramatic rights violation but through the slow injustice of a public body that will not act, delays without reason, or decides unfairly, the Ombudsman is the forum designed for it. The office cannot compel in the way a court can, and its recommendations depend for their force on the cooperation of the bodies it investigates, but it widens the range of remedies available to an ordinary person and takes pressure off the courts.
2.8 The Sierra Leone Police
The Sierra Leone Police is the primary law-enforcement agency, charged with apprehending offenders, maintaining law and order, protecting life and property, and keeping citizens safe. The circulated note traces the Force to section 3 of the Police Ordinance, Cap 150 of the Laws of Sierra Leone 1960; the Force also has a constitutional footing, since section 155 of the Constitution establishes the Sierra Leone Police under the command of the Inspector-General. As a rights institution the Force has two faces. It protects individuals from violations, and it prosecutes those who abuse the rights of others in the courts of summary jurisdiction. It is also, in the words of the circulated note, allegedly one of the leading perpetrators of violations in the country, and in response has undertaken reforms aimed at accountability and professionalism.
The lecture spent time on the single hardest test of police and rights, the policing of assemblies and protest. In a democratic society the right to assemble and to protest is guaranteed by section 26, and the police role is to enable the protest to proceed lawfully and peacefully, not to suppress it. An authoritarian State reaches for force at the first sign of a protest, because that is the reflex the system has built; a constitutional State cannot, and force must be the exception to the exception. What that requires in practice is negotiated management: the police engage the organisers, agree the route and the terms, and hold the line so the assembly can happen. The lecturer drew on episodes in which a threatened confrontation was defused because the Inspector-General and the organisers negotiated rather than fought, and contrasted them with the pattern in which protest is met with force. The lesson is that a person cannot enjoy the right to assemble without a police service that sees its job as protecting the protest, and that the professional formation of officers, through the ranks of promotion and specialised and overseas training the lecturer described, is part of how a rights-respecting force is built.
2.9 Non-governmental institutions: the Bar Association, LEGAL LINK, CARL and LAWYERS
Alongside the State institutions, a set of non-governmental bodies carries much of the day-to-day work of protecting and promoting rights. They hold no coercive constitutional power, which is why the lecture ranked them last, but in practice they often do the heaviest lifting. (a) The Sierra Leone Bar Association. The Bar Association is the professional body for legal practitioners, and it protects rights through advocacy, representation and public education. It represents individuals whose rights have been violated, including its own members; it raises awareness through workshops and seminars on the rule of law, human rights and good governance; and its advocacy has helped drive legal and policy reform toward international standards.
(b) LEGAL LINK. LEGAL LINK is a non-profit legal organisation that defends the rights of religious communities and vulnerable groups. Since its establishment in 2018 it has provided free and timely legal services to those groups, run legal advocacy on sensitive rights issues, litigated public-interest matters, and produced advisory opinions on laws that carry grave implications for the enjoyment of rights; within six years it had become a well-known name in the field and won awards for its work. (c)
The Centre for Accountability and the Rule of Law. CARL promotes the rule of law and accountability through research, law and policy reform, advocacy and public education, monitors violations, and provides legal assistance to victims through litigation at both the national and the West African sub-regional level, which is the level at which the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice sits. (d) LAWYERS. Legal Access for Women Yearning for Equality Rights and Social Justice focuses on the rights of women and girls, providing free legal aid to victims of sexual and domestic violence and discrimination, campaigning for gender equality and women’s empowerment, and partnering with State and non-State institutions to amplify its work. Read against Part Four, these organisations are the country’s working answer to the access-to-justice gap, but they operate on grant funding and cannot substitute for a properly resourced State system.
2.10 The limits on the State’s human rights obligations
This subsection draws on the oral lecture and is not part of the circulated note. The lecturer set it as an examination-style problem: when a State is called to answer for a failure to secure rights, what can it lawfully plead in limitation, and how far do those pleas go?
The duty to protect and promote rights is not unlimited, and a State brought before a court will plead the recognised limits. Four recur, and the skill is to know which are legitimate, and how far each reaches, rather than to treat them as a blank cheque. (a)
Sovereignty. A State may resist external interference in its internal affairs on the ground of sovereignty. The limit on the limit is that a State cannot hide behind sovereignty to escape obligations it has freely assumed by ratifying a treaty; sovereignty explains why the State, not an outsider, is the primary duty-bearer, but it does not dissolve the duty. (b) National security. A State may restrict the exercise of some rights in the genuine interest of national security. The Chapter III guarantees are themselves qualified by clawback clauses permitting restrictions that are reasonably required and justifiable in a democratic society, and national security is one such ground. The limit is that the restriction must be genuinely necessary and proportionate, not a pretext, which is exactly the question the Supreme Court asked and answered against the State in Marrah.
(c) Derogation in a public emergency. During a validly declared state of public emergency a State may derogate from some obligations, that is, suspend or curtail certain rights for the duration. Derogation is tightly bounded. It is available only in a genuine emergency threatening the life of the nation, only to the extent strictly required by the situation, and never against the non-derogable core, the right to life, the prohibition of torture and of slavery, and the guarantees against retroactive criminal punishment, which cannot be suspended even in the gravest emergency. The distinction between derogable and non-derogable rights is the heart of this limit. (d)
Progressive realisation within maximum available resources. For the economic, social and cultural rights, a State’s obligation is to take steps, to the maximum of its available resources, to achieve progressively the full realisation of the rights. A poor State cannot be condemned for failing to deliver overnight what its resources cannot fund. But progressive realisation is not a licence for inaction: the duty to move deliberately toward realisation, and to satisfy a minimum core, is immediate, and a State that does nothing cannot shelter behind poverty. Applied honestly, these four limits explain most of the ground a State will stand on when it is called to account; applied dishonestly, they are the excuses that Part Four shows recurring in practice.
2.11 Critical assessment of the institutional framework
On paper the framework is close to complete. There is a guardian executive, a law-making and oversight legislature, an independent judiciary with a constitutional rights jurisdiction, a national human rights commission, a legal aid board, an ombudsman, a police service with a rights mandate, and a dense civil society. Few countries at Sierra Leone’s income level have assembled as much. The problem, which Part Four documents, is that the paper completeness masks a functional thinness: the Commission is under-funded and short of enforcement teeth, the courts are slow and concentrated in Freetown, legal aid cannot reach the countryside, and the police are as often the threat as the shield.
Two structural weaknesses deserve emphasis because reform could reach them. The first is the Judiciary’s design. Channelling rights enforcement through a Supreme Court that is also the constitutional and electoral court guarantees that ordinary rights claims wait behind the contests of the powerful, which is the case for the dedicated human rights forum the lecture proposed. The second is the dependence of the whole system on the good faith of the first-ranked institution. Because the Presidency commands the security forces, declares emergencies and controls the pace of treaty domestication, a President who takes the guardian role seriously can make the framework work, and one who does not can hollow it out from the top while every box remains ticked. That dependence is the strongest argument for the checks that Part Five’s reforms try, unevenly, to strengthen.
PART THREE: SUCCESSFUL HUMAN RIGHTS CASE LAW JURISPRUDENCE AT THE DOMESTIC LEVEL
3.1 Introduction
Part Two described the institutions in the abstract. This Part asks what they have actually delivered, read through the cases and inquiries in which rights were vindicated. The value of a decided case is that it converts a constitutional guarantee into a concrete outcome: a barrister’s car and person unlawfully detained on election day, a family’s land taken by armed men, a President told he may still sue, striking miners whose deaths were investigated. Four of the five matters below come from the circulated note; the fifth, the Sam-Sumana litigation, comes from the lecture and is examined because it teaches more about the constitutional limits on power than any of the others. The through-line is the one drawn in Part Two: the courts and the Commission can bite, and when they do it is section 28 and section 171(15) that give the bite its force.
3.2 Marrah v Inspector-General of Police (2022)
The , a practising barrister and solicitor, brought an action seeking clarification of measures taken by the Sierra Leone Police under the direction of the Inspector-General on election day in 2018. He approached the Supreme Court for an interpretation of sections 17, 18, 21 and 31, among others, of the Constitution, contending that the measures were inconsistent with his fundamental rights and were not justifiable in a democratic society. The measures in issue were public pronouncements by the Inspector-General banning vehicular traffic on election day, under cover of which police officers detained the plaintiff’s vehicle and his person.
The Supreme Court’s reasoning moved in three steps. First, it asked what the Inspector-General’s notice was in law, and found it was neither a Constitutional Instrument nor a nor an Act of Parliament, and so was not law in Sierra Leone at all. Second, it found that no power to make such a pronouncement had been conferred on the Inspector-General by Parliament in terms of section 106(9) of the Constitution. Third, and most strikingly, it reasoned that in purporting to make law the Inspector-General had laid himself open to a graver charge: by altering in effect the operation of sections 17, 18 and 21, he was usurping the legislative function of Parliament, conduct that section 108(8) deems to be treason. The Court held that no law existed in March 2018 sanctioning a ban on vehicular traffic on election day, that the Inspector-General had directly or indirectly authorised his subordinates to detain the plaintiff’s vehicle and person, and that he had thereby violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights. Compensatory damages were awarded.
The case is the leading modern statement that the police cannot make law by pronouncement and cannot restrict a Chapter III right without lawful authority. It matters for Part Two’s account of the Police and for Part Four’s account of assembly and movement, because it draws the line the negotiated-management model presupposes: an order that curtails freedom of movement is worthless unless it rests on a statute or instrument that Parliament has authorised.
3.3 Pratt v Senesie (2025)
The plaintiffs owned two pieces of land at Peninsula Road, Mama Beach, in the Western Area, their ownership evidenced by a of registered in the Book of Statutory Declarations at the Registrar-General’s Office. They had bought the land from a predecessor who had been in adverse possession for over twenty years. When they began construction, the first and second entered the land with armed military men in July 2022, destroyed the works and occupied the land as State land, and the fifth and sixth defendants then took possession on the footing that the State had allocated it to them. The plaintiffs sued the Supreme Court for a declaration that their protection from deprivation of property under section 21 had been violated.
The Court framed four issues and decided each for the plaintiffs. (a) Was the land State land? No: the signature of the Director of Surveys on a survey plan is not a formality but a crucial indication that the land is not State land. (b) Did the plaintiffs have valid title? Yes: their title was valid and enforceable because their predecessor had held a valid possessory title. (c) Was section 21 breached? Yes: there was no evidence of the exceptional circumstances that alone justify compulsory acquisition under section 21, and none of the plaintiffs had been compensated for the loss of their property. (d) Had the defendants committed ? Yes: the unauthorised entry of the defendants, or of anyone authorised by them, onto the plaintiffs’ property was trespass. The Court held that private citizens cannot be forcibly removed from their land except in accordance with section 21, and that the State and those acting for it cannot arbitrarily enter private property claiming ownership where the private person holds valid deeds supported by a survey plan signed by the Director of Surveys.
For a practitioner the case is doubly useful. It confirms that possessory title, properly declared and registered, will hold against the State, and it disciplines the recurring abuse in which State actors use the label of State land, backed by soldiers, to dispossess private owners without acquisition proceedings or compensation. It is the property-law counterpart to Marrah: the State may act only through lawful process, and a right is enforceable against the government itself.
3.4 Kabbah v Firetex (SL) Ltd (1996)
This was an appeal before the Court of Appeal in which the had, by the time the matter was called, become President of the Republic. Counsel for the , Dr Marcus-Jones, took a : that the appellant’s status had changed and the action ought to be stayed until he ceased to hold office; that the person of the President is inviolable and cannot be impeached in his own courts; and that it is beneath the dignity of the office, and contrary to international and municipal law, for a Head of State to pursue a remedy in his own courts against his own subjects while in office. Counsel for the appellant answered that section 48(4) of the Constitution precludes anyone from instituting or continuing legal action against a sitting President, but says nothing to prohibit the President from pursuing his own remedies and enforcing his own rights in court.
Gelaga-King JA held that there is nothing in section 48(4) that stops a President from pursuing, in an action he began before taking office, remedies against a decision that had gone against him below. Having so held, however, he would stay the proceedings and refer the question to the Supreme Court under section 124 for determination. The other two Justices agreed that section 48(4) does not preclude the President from bringing an action, but disagreed on the referral, holding that no reference to the Supreme Court was needed. By a majority of two to one the preliminary objection was overruled and the appeal proceeded without further delay. The case fixes an important asymmetry in the immunity conferred by section 48(4). The provision shields a sitting President from being sued; it does not disable the President from suing to vindicate his own rights. Access to court, a component of the fair-hearing guarantee, is preserved for the office-holder even as the office-holder is protected from suit, and the decision shows the Court of Appeal reasoning carefully about the boundary rather than deferring reflexively to the dignity of the office.
3.5 The Bumbuna Inquiry of the Human Rights Commission
This matter arose from the Bumbuna mining protests, in which police clashed with striking workers and the Human Rights Commission launched an independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality. The legal issues it raised were the accountability of State actors, the role of independent human rights institutions, and freedom of assembly and expression. Although it was not a litigated case, the Commission’s inquiry report and findings were legally impactful: they led to national and international calls for reform in policing and the use of force.
The significance of Bumbuna is that it shows the fourth-ranked institution of Part Two doing what litigation could not. Where no claimant sued, the Commission investigated on its own motion, published findings against the State, and reinforced the principle of State responsibility for rights compliance in the setting of labour protest. It is the clearest domestic example of the watchdog function, and it is why Part Two treated the Commission’s power to investigate and report as more than advisory. It is also, read against Part Four, a reminder of the limit: an inquiry can name a wrong and demand reform, but it cannot by itself compel the reform to happen.
3.6 Sam-Sumana v Attorney-General (2015) and the ECOWAS Court ruling (2017)
This subsection draws on the oral lecture and is not part of the circulated note. The lecturer used the litigation to teach the constitutional limits on the removal of a Vice-President, the status of party membership as a condition of office, and the tension between the domestic apex court and the regional court. It is also the case that lies behind the removal clause analysed in Part Five.
The facts. On 6 March 2015 the National Advisory Committee of the ruling All People’s Congress expelled the Vice-President, Alhaji Samuel Sam-Sumana, from the party on several charges. On 17 March 2015 President Koroma declared him relieved of his duties as Vice-President and appointed Victor Bockarie Foh in his place. Sam-Sumana, who had sought asylum at the United States embassy after soldiers surrounded his residence, challenged the removal in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decision (9 September 2015). Five judges upheld the removal. The reasoning did not turn on the impeachment machinery in sections 50 and 51 of the Constitution, which govern removal for gross misconduct on a petition to the Speaker. It turned instead on party membership: because Sam-Sumana had ceased to belong to the political party on whose ticket he had been elected, a vacancy arose in the office of Vice-President, so that the President had the right, and indeed was bound, to fill it. As the lecturer put it, the case did not really turn on the national Constitution at all; it ended on the party’s constitution, in the sense that the loss of party membership was treated as decisive of the constitutional office. The ECOWAS Court ruling (2017). Dissatisfied, Sam-Sumana took the matter to the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States in Abuja, which applies the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights directly. That court reached the opposite conclusion on the process: it held that due process had not been followed, that the dismissal violated his right to a fair hearing under the African Charter, and it ordered payment of his outstanding salary and emoluments from the date of dismissal. The pivot was the party’s own internal procedure. The All People’s Congress constitution provided a thirty-day window for an internal appeal against expulsion; the party expelled him on 6 March 2015 and he lodged his appeal some twenty days later, inside the window. Acting on the expulsion, and removing him from office, before that internal appeal had run its course was the failure of due process the regional court identified. This is exactly the point the lecturer pressed: the removing authority should have waited for the appeal window to close before treating the expulsion as final.
What the two rulings teach. Three lessons come out of the pairing. (a) Party membership can be a condition of office. On the domestic reasoning, an elected office-holder who loses the party membership on which the office rests can lose the office, a principle with obvious force for both the Vice-Presidency and parliamentary seats. (b) Substance and process are different questions. The Supreme Court answered the substantive question, whether loss of party membership created a vacancy, in the affirmative; the ECOWAS Court answered the procedural question, whether the removal respected due process, in the negative. Both can be right on their own terms, which is why the reform Bill in Part Five tries to settle who may remove a Vice-President, and how. (c) The domestic apex court and the regional court can diverge. The Government, through the Attorney-General, dismissed the ECOWAS ruling as lacking jurisdiction over a matter already decided by the Supreme Court, which exposes the practical limit of the regional mechanism: its judgments bind on the international plane and command moral and political weight, but their enforcement depends on the very State that has been found against.
3.7 Critical assessment: what the jurisprudence shows and where it stops
Read together the cases make an encouraging point and a sobering one. The encouraging point is that the courts and the Commission will act against power. Marrah struck down a police pronouncement and reframed it as a usurpation of Parliament; Pratt held the State to lawful process before it could touch titled land; Kabbah preserved access to court even for, and against, a President; the Bumbuna inquiry named State violence that no lawsuit had reached. A rights system that produces these outcomes is not a dead letter.
The sobering point is how thin the body of successful cases is, and how much it leaves undone. These are a handful of decisions over three decades, most of them from the Supreme Court, most of them turning on the litigant’s ability to reach that court, which Part Two identified as a structural bottleneck and Part Four shows most citizens cannot cross. The Sam-Sumana pairing adds a further limit: a domestic victory can be reversed in substance by a regional court whose ruling the State then declines to honour, and a regional victory can be worth little without domestic enforcement. The jurisprudence therefore proves the framework can work; it does not prove that it works for the ordinary person, which is the gap Part Four measures and Part Five tries, in part, to close.
PART FOUR: CHALLENGES IN THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
4.1 Introduction
Part Two showed a nearly complete institutional architecture; Part Three showed it can work. Part Four asks why, for most people, it does not. The circulated note sets out twelve challenges, and they are grouped and explained below with concrete examples, because a student who can only name the challenges has learned less than one who can show how each plays out on the ground and how the challenges feed one another. The recurring pattern, drawn together in the assessment at the end, is that most of these failures are not failures of law on the page. They are failures of funding, of reach beyond Freetown, and of the enforcement of decisions once they are made.
4.2 A weak rule of law and an under-resourced judiciary
The first challenge is the weakness of the rule of law and of the judicial system on which every other protection depends. (a) Corruption in the judiciary undermines public and access to justice, because a litigant who believes an outcome can be bought will not believe a court can protect a right. (b) Delay flows from understaffing, poor infrastructure and the absence of legal aid, so that even a meritorious claim can take years the claimant cannot afford. (c) Weak enforcement of judgments, especially in rural areas, means that a court order can be won and then ignored, which is the most corrosive failure of all: it turns a remedy into a piece of paper. The practical shape of this is visible in pre-trial detention. Correctional centres, Pademba Road in Freetown above all, hold large remand populations for long periods because arrest, charge and practice upstream feeds people into custody faster than the courts can try them. A person held for two years awaiting trial has, in substance, lost the personal-liberty guarantee of section 17 long before any court rules on guilt.
4.3 Limited access to justice
The second challenge is access to justice, and it is largely a problem of geography and language. (a) Cost and scarcity. High legal costs and the shortage of lawyers outside Freetown mean the poor go unrepresented, and representation is itself part of the fair-hearing right. (b) Language. Court proceedings are conducted in English, which is a barrier to the many citizens who do not use it, so that a person may sit through a hearing that decides their liberty or their land without following it. (c) Under-funded legal aid. Legal aid services are under-funded and do not reach rural communities. The Legal Aid Board described in Part Two is the working answer, and its use of paralegals to reach communities no lawyer serves is a genuine innovation, but a body dependent on limited State and donor funding cannot cover a whole country. The practical result is a two-tier system: a person in central Freetown can find a lawyer and, if indigent, may reach the Board; a person in a rural chiefdom often has neither, and the customary forum they do reach may apply rules that the national law overrides but that no one is there to challenge.
4.4 Gender-based discrimination and violence
The third challenge is gender-based discrimination and violence. (a) Under-reporting. Gender-based violence, including rape and domestic abuse, often goes unreported because of stigma and fear of reprisal, so the recorded figures understate the problem and few perpetrators are held to account. (b) Conflict of laws. Customary and religious rules frequently conflict with the statutory protections enacted for women and girls, and in much of the country the customary rule prevails in practice. (c) Under-representation. Women remain under-represented in leadership and public decision-making, which is the problem the thirty-per-cent quota in Part Five is meant to address. Sierra Leone has legislated against this challenge: the suite of gender laws passed in 2007 and the sexual-offences legislation that followed set out real protections. The persistence of the challenge despite the legislation is the clearest illustration of the note’s central theme: the law on the page is not the difficulty; reporting, enforcement and the dominance of customary practice are.
4.5 Child rights violations
The fourth challenge is the violation of children’s rights. (a) Child labour is common in mining and in street vending, pulling children out of school and into hazardous work.
(b) Early and forced marriage continues in some rural areas. (c) Weak protection and registration. Child protection services are weak and birth registration is poor, and without a birth certificate a child struggles to access the services that depend on proof of age and identity. Here the law has moved recently and decisively: Sierra Leone enacted a prohibition on child marriage in 2024, setting eighteen as the minimum age and attaching penalties, a landmark response to the second of these problems. The statute is a real answer, backed by the Child Rights Act 2007. Whether it changes practice in the chiefdoms where early marriage persists will depend, as with the gender laws, on enforcement rather than on the text.
4.6 The rights of persons with disabilities
The fifth challenge is the exclusion of persons with disabilities. They face exclusion through inaccessible buildings and negative social attitudes; public infrastructure, including schools and public offices, is often not accessible; and the Persons with Disability Act 2011 is poorly enforced. The pattern is by now familiar. A rights-affirming statute exists, and even establishes a commission, but the physical environment and the administration have not been made to comply, so a person who uses a wheelchair cannot enter the public office that holds their rights, and the anti-discrimination guarantee remains largely unenforced. The example makes the general point in concrete form: a right of access means nothing if the building has no ramp and no one compels one to be built.
4.7 Poverty and inequality
The sixth challenge is poverty and inequality, which sit underneath most of the others. Poverty and unemployment drive exploitation and abuse; access to health, education and housing is limited for vulnerable populations; and some young people and children turn to harmful survival strategies, including sex work and street life. This is the challenge that ties Part Four back to the progressive-realisation limit in Part Two: many of the economic and social rights at stake are subject to realisation within the maximum of available resources, and Sierra Leone’s resources are genuinely constrained. The honest analysis holds two things at once. A poor State cannot be blamed for failing to fund overnight what its revenue cannot reach. But poverty does not explain the failures that cost little or nothing, an unenforced court order, an accessible ramp, a birth registration system, and it must not become the standing excuse for inaction that the progressive-realisation standard was never meant to license.
4.8 Corruption and poor governance
The seventh challenge is corruption and poor governance. Corruption in State institutions diverts the resources that should deliver services, and weak oversight of the security forces leaves their abuses unchecked. The two limbs reinforce each other: money meant for courts, clinics and schools disappears, and the forces that should be held to account are not, so the very institutions ranked highest in Part Two for their capacity to protect are also, unsupervised, the ones best placed to harm. Sierra Leone has an Anti-Corruption Commission with power to investigate and prosecute without the fiat of the Attorney-General, which is a real institutional tool. The tool exists; the challenge is that the diversion of resources and the weak oversight of security forces persist alongside it, which again locates the problem in enforcement and political will rather than in the absence of law.
4.9 Freedom of expression and assembly, and the policing of protest
The eighth challenge is the constraint on expression and assembly. (a) Harassment and arbitrary arrest. Journalists and activists have faced harassment and arbitrary arrest. (b) Cybercrime laws turned against critics. Cybercrime legislation has been used to silence critics online, so that a statute passed to address genuine online harm becomes an instrument against dissent, the double-edged law-making that Part Two warned of. (c) Suppression of protest. Peaceful protests are sometimes met with police brutality, or are refused clearance altogether. It is worth setting against this the one clear advance: the criminal and seditious regime long used against the press was repealed in 2020, which shows the direction of travel is not uniformly backward.
The lecture developed the policing of protest at length, and the treatment belongs here as much as in Part Two. In a democratic society the right to assemble under section 26 carries a corresponding police duty to enable the assembly to proceed peacefully rather than to crush it. The authoritarian reflex is to meet protest with force; the constitutional standard makes force the exception to the exception and requires negotiated management, in which the police engage the organisers, agree terms and hold the line. The lecturer’s examples of confrontations defused by negotiation between the Inspector-General and organisers show the model working, and Marrah supplies its legal backbone: a police order that curtails movement or assembly is lawful only if it rests on an instrument Parliament has authorised, and a pronouncement that does not is no law at all. The challenge the circulated note records, protest refused clearance or met with force, is therefore both a practical failure of policing and, where it rests on unlawful orders, a legal wrong the courts can strike down.
4.10 Customary practice against national and international law
The ninth challenge is the collision between customary practice and national law. Customary law often overrides national statute in areas such as land rights and inheritance, so that a widow entitled under the Devolution of Estates Act may still be dispossessed under a customary rule applied in her chiefdom. And female genital cutting continues within secret societies despite national and international condemnation. This challenge is distinctive because it is not a failure of enforcement in the ordinary sense but a genuine plurality of legal orders, in which the customary order commands real allegiance and reaches places the national order does not. The tension runs back to the access-to-justice problem: where the only accessible forum is the customary one, and no lawyer or paralegal is present to invoke the national rule, the national rule does not operate however clearly Parliament has stated it.
4.11 The post-conflict legacy and trauma
The tenth challenge is the unfinished business of the civil war. Many victims still await reparations and recognition, and mental-health services for war-affected populations remain severely limited. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission catalogued the violations and made recommendations, but two decades on the reparations programme has reached only part of those it was meant to serve, and the psychological toll of the conflict is met by a mental-health system that can barely function. The example shows how a challenge can persist not because it is contested but because it is under-resourced and under-prioritised: no one argues that war victims should go without reparations, yet the programme is starved of the funds that would complete it.
4.12 Weak national human rights institutions
The eleventh challenge is the weakness of the national human rights institutions themselves. The Human Rights Commission described in Part Two lacks funding and enforcement powers, and grassroots-level violations often go undocumented and unpunished. This is the point at which Part Four turns back on Part Two. The Commission that ranks fourth among the protective institutions, and that did in the Bumbuna inquiry what litigation could not, is itself hamstrung by the same under-funding that afflicts the courts and the Legal Aid Board. An institution that can investigate and report, but cannot fund enough investigators to reach the communities where violations happen, and cannot compel implementation of its findings, will always deliver less than its mandate promises.
4.13 Inadequate data, monitoring and the protection of defenders
The twelfth challenge is a set of monitoring and protection gaps that make the others harder to solve. (a) Poor data. There is a lack of disaggregated data on abuses against women, children, persons with disabilities and other groups, and without disaggregated data a State cannot see where violations concentrate or measure whether an intervention worked. (b) Weak coordination. Coordination between government and civil society is poor, so effort is duplicated and gaps go uncovered. (c)
No protection for defenders. There is no law to protect human rights defenders in the country, which leaves the activists, paralegals and organisation staff who do much of the work of Part Two exposed to the harassment recorded in Part Four with no dedicated legal shield. The absence of a defenders’ law is the sharpest of these gaps, because it directly endangers the people the whole system relies on, and it is a gap Parliament could close with a single statute.
4.14 Critical assessment: the common denominator
The twelve challenges are not twelve separate problems. Read across them, three causes recur and explain most of what fails. The first is money: the courts, the Legal Aid Board, the Commission, the reparations programme and the mental-health system all under-perform because they are under-funded, and under-funding is itself worsened by the corruption that diverts resources. The second is reach: nearly every protection thins to nothing outside Freetown, where lawyers are scarce, English is a barrier, and the accessible forum is often the customary one that the national law is meant to override. The third is enforcement: a judgment ignored, a statute unenforced, a commission finding unimplemented, a ramp never built. These three, not any shortage of law on the page, are where the framework breaks.
That diagnosis carries a warning for Part Five. If the real constraints are money, reach and enforcement, then constitutional amendment can help only where it reaches those constraints. Reforms that change how power is won and transferred, or that guarantee women a share of political office, address real problems and may improve the political conditions for rights over time. But no clause in an amendment Bill funds a rural court, places a paralegal in a chiefdom, or compels a public body to obey an order it is ignoring. The gap Part Four measures is closed by budgets and administration as much as by constitutional text, and a reform debate that forgets this will improve the paper architecture that Part Two already showed to be nearly complete while leaving the lived reality that Part Four records largely untouched.
PART FIVE: CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM AND THE FUTURE OF RIGHTS PROTECTION
This entire Part draws on the oral lecture and is not part of the circulated note. The lecturer set the analysis of the reform Bill as the central preparation task for the class: for each proposed change, state the positives, state the negatives, and reach a reasoned recommendation, approaching the work as an academic rather than as a partisan. The verified facts about the Bill and the parliamentary process are footnoted to sources located through further research.
5.1 The Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill 2025: origins and process
The reforms the lecture worked through are contained in the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025, before Parliament during 2026. The Bill consolidates recommendations from two sources: the Constitutional Review Committee chaired by the late Justice Edmond Cowan, which was relaunched in 2013 and reported in January 2017, with a Government White Paper following in 2022; and the Tripartite Committee formed after the disputed general elections of 2023. It was piloted through Parliament by the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, who framed it as generational rather than partisan and said the Government intended to proceed in two phases: a first phase of non-entrenched, election-related amendments, and a later, broader phase of comprehensive reform.
Two features of the process matter for the analysis that follows. (a) The threshold for passage. A constitutional amendment requires the support of at least two-thirds of all Members of Parliament, roughly ninety-nine of the current one hundred and forty-nine seats, at both the second and third readings, and any entrenched clause requires, in addition, approval in a national referendum. (b) The dispute over legality. The process was bitterly contested. The ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party pressed the Bill; the opposition All People’s Congress opposed key provisions, in particular the reduced presidential threshold and permanent proportional representation, walked out of the Chamber over the Speaker’s ruling on the voting threshold, and disputed whether the amendments could lawfully be passed without a referendum. As of the middle of August 2026 the Bill had been reported passed through Parliament amid an opposition walkout, but its validity remained contested, which is itself part of what the class was asked to assess. The safest course for a student is to treat the Bill as a live and disputed proposal and to analyse each clause on its merits, which is what follows.
5.2 Clause-by-clause analysis: the positives, the negatives and a recommendation
For each clause the same discipline is applied: what it proposes, the case for it, the case against it, and a reasoned recommendation. The lecturer’s instruction was to argue as an academic, giving the strongest version of each side before settling, and to reach the number of provisions up toward twenty by adding others beyond the core list; the core provisions are analysed here and further ones are added at the end of the Part.
(a) Reducing the presidential victory threshold from 55 per cent to 50 per cent
plus one, with a geographic spread condition.
The Bill would replace the current requirement that a presidential candidate win at least 55 per cent of valid votes to be elected in the first round with a simple majority of 50 per cent plus one, combined with a spread condition requiring the winner to secure at least 20 per cent of the votes in two-thirds of the country’s districts; failing that, the top two candidates go to a run-off. Arguments in favour. Fifty per cent plus one is the ordinary democratic majority and is common across West, East and Southern Africa, so the reform aligns Sierra Leone with regional practice. The spread condition guards against a purely regional victory by requiring support across two-thirds of districts, which answers the fear that a lower threshold rewards ethnic or regional concentration. A lower first-round bar also makes an inconclusive, and expensive, run-off less likely.
Arguments against. The higher 55 per cent bar forces candidates to build broad national coalitions and gives the eventual winner greater legitimacy, which in a country with Sierra Leone’s regional cleavages is a real value. Civil society commentators observed that the Government offered no clear public rationale for the specific reduction, and warned that a lower threshold could encourage the very regional divisions the spread condition is meant to prevent. The change also touches the election of the President, an entrenched matter, so passing it without a referendum raises a serious question of constitutional validity.
Recommendation. The class position should be that the spread condition is sound and worth keeping whatever the threshold, but that the reduction to 50 per cent plus one should not be enacted without a published rationale and, more importantly, without the referendum that an entrenched provision requires. The legitimacy gained from a broad-coalition winner is worth preserving, and if it is to be traded away that should be done by the people in a referendum, not by a contested parliamentary vote.
(b) Replacing first-past-the-post with district-block proportional
representation for ordinary Members of Parliament.
The Bill would make proportional representation the permanent method for electing ordinary Members of Parliament, allocating seats in proportion to votes within district blocks, in place of the first-past-the-post system in which the single highest-polling candidate wins each constituency. Arguments in favour. Proportional representation translates votes into seats more faithfully, so a party with, say, a third of the national vote wins roughly a third of the seats rather than being wiped out by geographic distribution. It reduces the number of wasted votes, can lessen the winner-take-all bitterness that has marked Sierra Leonean elections, and makes it easier to guarantee outcomes such as the women’s quota because parties order their own lists. It also tends to reduce the incentive for the localised violence that attends a knife-edge constituency contest.
Arguments against. A list-based system weakens the direct link between a Member and an identifiable constituency, so citizens lose the single representative they can hold to account for local problems, which in a country where the Member is often the only channel to the State is a genuine loss. It can strengthen party headquarters at the expense of the voter, because the party controls list order and therefore who enters Parliament. Making it permanent, rather than reviewing it after a cycle, forecloses learning from experience.
Recommendation. The class should favour proportional representation in principle for its fairer translation of votes and its usefulness in delivering the women’s quota, but should resist entrenching it as permanent in the same breath. A better design keeps a constituency link, whether through a mixed system or a district-block model tight enough that voters still know their representatives, and provides for review after one or two electoral cycles before permanence is considered.
(c) Clarifying the removal of the President and Vice-President, and the section 54 question.
The Bill would provide that the removal of a President or Vice-President who has been expelled from the party under whose banner they were elected is a matter for Parliament, by a defined majority, as the body with power to determine it. The lecturer’s sharp question was whether this is not simply duplicating what the Constitution already says, given that section 54 already applies to the Vice-President the provisions that govern the President. Is it duplicitous? Not quite, and the Sam-Sumana litigation shows why. Section 54 does extend the presidential removal machinery to the Vice-President, and to that extent a bare restatement would add nothing. But the removal of Sam-Sumana did not proceed under that machinery at all: the Supreme Court upheld it on the ground that loss of party membership created a vacancy, sidestepping the impeachment route in sections 50 and 51, while the ECOWAS Court found the process defective for want of due process. The existing provisions therefore left a live gap, whether ceasing to belong to a party can end the office, and if so by whose decision and with what process.
A clause that fixes the answer, vesting the decision in Parliament by a stated majority and requiring due process, is not redundant; it closes precisely the gap that produced a decade of litigation and a split between the domestic and regional courts.
Recommendation. The class should support a clause that settles the removal question, but should insist that it do the work the existing law failed to do: state expressly whether and how loss of party membership affects the office, require a fair-hearing process before any removal takes effect, and, if Parliament is to be the deciding body, fix the majority. A clause that merely repeats section 54 should be rejected as surplusage; a clause that resolves the Sam-Sumana gap should be welcomed.
(d) Reforming the appointment of the Chief Electoral Commissioner.
The Bill would change how the head of the electoral body is appointed, moving away from a direct presidential nomination toward a nomination through a search-and-nominations committee before the candidate goes to Parliament for approval. Arguments in favour. The electoral umpire must be, and be seen to be, independent, and an appointment routed through an independent committee rather than emerging from the President’s sole choice reduces the perception that the umpire owes the office to the incumbent. After a disputed election the credibility of the commission is itself a rights issue, because the right to participate in genuine elections depends on a trusted referee.
Arguments against. The value of the reform depends entirely on how the committee is composed. A committee that is itself packed by the executive changes the appearance without changing the substance, and simply moves the point of capture. The clause was among those left unresolved in Parliament precisely because the composition could not be agreed.
Recommendation. The class should support the reform on condition that the committee’s composition is genuinely plural, drawing on the judiciary, the Bar, civil society and cross-party nomination, and is written into the Constitution rather than left to ordinary law that a majority can rewrite. Independence of the umpire is worth having; a cosmetic committee is not.
(e) Fixing the dates of general elections.
The Bill would set fixed dates for general elections rather than leaving the timing to be set within a permitted window. Arguments in favour. A fixed date removes the incumbent’s ability to choose a moment of maximum advantage, gives all parties and the electoral body a certain horizon to plan and budget against, and reduces the manipulation and uncertainty that discretionary timing invites. Arguments against. Rigidity can be costly if an emergency, a natural disaster or a public-health crisis makes the fixed date impracticable, so the clause needs a carefully bounded provision for postponement that cannot itself be abused. Recommendation. The class should support fixed dates as a clear gain for fairness and planning, provided the clause includes a narrow, objective and independently supervised mechanism for postponement in a genuine emergency, so that the certainty it creates cannot be undone through the back door.
(f) A minimum thirty per cent quota for women.
The Bill would guarantee a minimum of thirty per cent representation for women in political party nominations and in political leadership. Arguments in favour. Women are markedly under-represented in Sierra Leonean public life, as Part Four records, and a constitutional quota is a direct and measurable remedy that a proportional-representation list system makes straightforward to deliver. The provision has rare cross-party support, which gives it both legitimacy and a good chance of survival. Arguments against. A quota can be criticised as treating symptoms rather than the causes of exclusion, and, if loosely drafted, parties may satisfy it by placing women in unwinnable positions, meeting the letter while defeating the purpose. Recommendation. The class should support the quota, which addresses a real and documented deficit, while insisting that it be drafted to bite: a placement rule that puts women in winnable positions on party lists, not merely a headline percentage of nominees, so that thirty per cent of nominations becomes something close to thirty per cent of seats.
(g) Allowing independent candidates.
The Bill originally proposed allowing candidates to stand without running under a registered political party, provided they met the qualifying requirements, including for the presidency. In the parliamentary process, however, lawmakers agreed to remove the clause that would have allowed independent candidates to contest presidential elections. Arguments in favour. Requiring every candidate to belong to a party excludes able citizens who command public trust but no party machine, and independent candidacy widens choice and reduces the parties’ monopoly on entry to public life. It connects to the Sam-Sumana problem: if party membership is a condition of holding office, allowing independents at least gives voters an alternative to the party gatekeepers. Arguments against. At the presidential level an independent without a national organisation may struggle to govern or to command a legislative majority, and the fear of fragmentation is part of why the presidential limb was dropped. Independents can also complicate the operation of a party-list proportional system. Recommendation. The class should support independent candidacy at the parliamentary and local level, where it widens genuine choice at manageable risk, and should treat the removal of the presidential limb as a defensible compromise given the governability concern, while noting that the exclusion sits awkwardly with the principle that citizens should not be forced into a party to serve.
(h) Shortening the period a public officer must resign before contesting, from twelve months to six.
The Bill would reduce, from twelve months to six, the period before an election within which a person holding certain public offices must resign in order to contest. Arguments in favour. Twelve months is a long time to be out of employment before an uncertain contest, and shortening it lowers the barrier to political participation for public servants, widening the pool of candidates. Arguments against. The resignation rule exists to stop office-holders from using the resources, staff and platform of their office to campaign, and the shorter the window, the closer to the election an official can remain in a position they can abuse for advantage. Recommendation. The class should be cautious. The purpose of the rule is to prevent incumbency abuse, and six months may be too short to serve it, especially for offices that control budgets or security. If the period is shortened it should be paired with strict, enforceable limits on the use of official resources for campaigning in the run-up to a poll.
(i) The timing of the announcement of results and of election petitions.
The Bill addresses the windows around the declaration of results and the bringing of election petitions. The lecturer’s concern was less the exact number of days than a structural point: that the current scheme announces a result and swears in a winner before the challenge to that result has been heard, and that the announcement is not expressly marked as provisional. Arguments in favour of shorter, clearer windows. A tight, certain timetable for challenges reduces the period of destabilising uncertainty after a poll and gets the country to a settled government sooner. Arguments against. Compressing the window to bring a petition can defeat the right to challenge, because assembling the evidence of electoral wrongdoing takes time, and a three-day window may be too short to mount a genuine case. More fundamentally, speed is worthless if the winner is sworn in before the challenge is heard. Recommendation. The class should press the lecturer’s structural fix rather than argue over days: the announcement of results should be expressly declared provisional, and the swearing-in should be timed so that petition windows are respected, so that the timetable protects the right to challenge instead of overriding it. This flows directly into the next clause.
(j) Post-election limits on the outgoing President, and whether a President-
elect should be sworn in before petitions are cleared.
The Bill would limit what an outgoing President may do after an election has been held: restricting major public appointments, the signing of contracts and the pursuit of constitutional changes once the President is, in effect, on the way out. The lecturer paired this with the sharper question he pressed on the class: should the President-elect be sworn in at all before every election petition has been cleared? The case for restraint and for delaying the oath. A President who has lost, or who faces an unresolved challenge, should not be able to bind the country with major appointments and contracts on the way out, or to entrench changes a successor cannot undo, so the post-election limits are a sensible guard against a lame-duck consolidating power or salting the ground. On the same logic, swearing in a President before the petitions against the result are heard risks installing, and clothing with the powers of the office, a person a court may shortly unseat, which is both destabilising and hard to reverse. Better, on this view, to pause the oath until the challenges are cleared.
The case against delaying the oath. A State cannot be left without a President while petitions run, because someone must hold executive authority, command the security forces and represent the country. Delay creates a vacuum and its own instability, and a determined loser could weaponise petitions simply to prevent a transition. There is also force in getting a President into place early so that disputes are resolved around a functioning office rather than an empty one.
Recommendation. The class should reject the two extremes and take a middle path. The President-elect should be sworn in on the ordinary timetable, so the country is never without an executive, but the announced result should be expressly provisional, and the newly sworn President should be barred from the major irreversible acts, senior appointments, long-term contracts, constitutional moves, until the petition window has closed and any challenge is resolved. That preserves continuity of government while ensuring that nothing irreversible is done by a President whom a court might unseat. The post-election limits on the outgoing President should be supported for the same reason, and the two sets of restraints should be drafted to dovetail so that neither the departing nor the arriving President can act irreversibly while the result is genuinely in doubt.
(k) Political inclusion of the diaspora and dual citizens.
The Bill expands the political inclusion of dual citizens, and the lecture connected this to a petition to Parliament from citizens abroad pressing the old grievance that they contribute heavily to the economy through remittances yet have no vote and no voice: representation, they argued, should follow contribution. Arguments in favour. The diaspora contributes a large share of national income through remittances and brings skills and capital, and a democracy that taxes and depends on a group while denying it a political voice is hard to defend on principle.
Widening inclusion for dual citizens draws that expertise into public life. Arguments against. There are genuine concerns about divided allegiance in the most sensitive offices, and about the practicalities and integrity of organising voting from abroad. The Constitution has historically disqualified dual citizens from sitting in Parliament for reasons of undivided loyalty, and relaxing that engages a real debate rather than an obvious wrong. Recommendation. The class should support expanding diaspora and dual-citizen participation as a matter of principle and economic realism, while distinguishing offices: the case for the vote and for ordinary participation is strong, but the most sensitive offices may reasonably retain a single-citizenship requirement, and any diaspora voting must be built on a system whose integrity can be assured.
5.3 One omnibus Bill or many, and the amendment pathway
Two questions the lecturer pressed go not to any single clause but to how the whole reform is being done. (a) Was it wise to fold every change into one omnibus Bill? The case for a single Bill is coherence and momentum: the changes interlock, and packaging them together lets a reform-minded majority carry the whole set on one wave rather than losing each piece to separate fights. The case against is exactly what unfolded in Parliament. Bundling a broadly supported provision, such as the women’s quota, with a bitterly contested one, such as the reduced presidential threshold, forces members to swallow what they reject in order to obtain what they support, obscures which specific change carries public consent, and lets a government present opposition to one clause as opposition to reform itself. The cleaner course, and the class recommendation, is to separate the clearly non-entrenched, consensus provisions from the contested and entrenched ones, so that each stands or falls on its own merits and the public can see what it is agreeing to.
(b) Which clauses are entrenched, and was the right pathway used? The Constitution distinguishes two classes of provision for the purpose of alteration under section 108. Ordinary, non-entrenched provisions can be altered by a two-thirds majority of Parliament. Entrenched provisions cannot be altered by Parliament alone: they require, in addition to the parliamentary majority, approval by the people in a national referendum. The entrenched class includes, among others, the fundamental-rights provisions of Chapter III and the provisions governing the office and the election of the President. This is what makes the pathway question so pointed. A change to the presidential victory threshold alters the provision on the election of the President, which is entrenched, and therefore, on the ordinary reading, cannot be made without a referendum, however large the parliamentary majority. The Government’s position, that the first phase consists of non-entrenched, election-related amendments that need no referendum, is precisely what the opposition and civil society dispute, and it is why the legality of the process, not merely the merits of the clauses, was in issue.
The class recommendation on pathway. A student should distinguish clearly. Genuinely non-entrenched, administrative or consensus changes may properly be made by the two-thirds route. But any clause touching the election or office of the President, or the Chapter III rights, is entrenched and should not be enacted without a referendum. Passing an entrenched change by parliamentary majority alone, even a two-thirds majority, is not merely politically contentious; it is open to challenge as constitutionally invalid, and a reform introduced by an unlawful pathway is built on sand. The correct course is to route the entrenched clauses through a referendum, which also has the merit of giving the most far-reaching changes the direct democratic mandate they deserve.
5.4 The overall position of the class
Taken as a whole, the Bill mixes reforms that deserve support with reforms that deserve caution, and a process that deserves criticism. The women’s quota, fixed election dates, an independent route to appointing the electoral umpire, a clear resolution of the Vice-President removal question, and wider diaspora participation are, with the drafting safeguards noted above, genuine improvements to the conditions in which rights are exercised. Proportional representation and independent candidacy are defensible in principle but should not be entrenched as permanent without a constituency link and a review. The reduced presidential threshold trades away a real source of winner legitimacy and should not be enacted without both a published rationale and a referendum. And the whole package should be unbundled, with the entrenched clauses sent to the people rather than pushed through Parliament alone.
The connecting thread back to the rest of this note is the one Part Four drew. These reforms operate on the political conditions for rights, how power is won, transferred and shared, and several of them would improve those conditions. None of them reaches the constraints that Part Four identified as decisive: the money, the reach beyond Freetown, and the enforcement of decisions. A better electoral system and a fairer distribution of political office are worth having, but the ordinary person’s experience of rights will be changed less by the text of an amendment than by whether a rural court is funded, a paralegal is present in the chiefdom, and a judgment once won is actually obeyed. The reform debate and the enforcement deficit are two different problems, and progress on the first should not be mistaken for progress on the second.
PART SIX: GENERAL CONCLUSION
Three themes hold this note together. The first is constitutional supremacy. Every institution in Part Two, every case in Part Three, and every reform in Part Five draws its authority from the Constitution of 1991, and it is section 171(15), making the Constitution supreme, and section 28, opening the Supreme Court to any person alleging a Chapter III violation, that convert paper guarantees into enforceable law. When the Supreme Court struck down a police pronouncement in Marrah or held the State to lawful process in Pratt, it was constitutional supremacy doing the work.
The second theme is the interdependence of the institutions. They are not separate silos but a single chain, and the chain is as strong as its weakest link. Remand overcrowding is manufactured upstream by arrest and bail practice, not by the correctional service; the quality of a criminal trial is fixed in the police interview room; the reach of a court judgment depends on whether anyone will enforce it in the chiefdom; and the value of the Human Rights Commission’s findings depends on whether the Presidency, ranked first, acts on the report the Commission submits to it each year. Part Two ranked the institutions by importance and warned that the ranking doubles as a ranking by capacity to do harm; Part Three showed the institutions holding power to account; Part Four showed the chain breaking wherever money, reach and enforcement run out.
The third theme is the gap between the paper architecture and the lived reality, and where reform can and cannot close it. Sierra Leone has built, on paper, a set of protective institutions more complete than its income would predict, and a small body of cases proves those institutions can work. Yet for most people the protections thin to nothing outside Freetown, defeated by cost, language, under-funding, the dominance of customary practice, and the simple failure to enforce decisions once made. The constitutional reforms of Part Five would improve the political conditions in which rights are exercised, and several deserve support with the drafting safeguards set out there. But none of them funds a rural court, places a paralegal in a chiefdom, or compels obedience to an ignored order. The task the module sets is to see all of this at once: to know the institutions, to read the cases that show them working, to name the challenges that show them failing, and to judge the reforms for what they can actually reach. A student who can do that has understood not only three topics but the single argument they make together.
PART SEVEN: EXAMINATION AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS WITH MODEL ANSWERS
This Part collects the questions the lecturer put to the class and answers them, then adds further questions for revision. The model answers are written as sketches: a defensible thesis and the authorities and points that support it, not full essays, so that a student can build an answer rather than recite one.
7.1 Questions put by the lecturer
Question 1. List the key institutions for the protection of human rights in
Sierra Leone in their order of importance, and defend the ranking.
Answer. The defensible order is the President, Parliament, the Judiciary, the Human Rights Commission, the Legal Aid Board, the Ombudsman, the Police, and then the non-State institutions. The organising test is how much of the rights architecture would collapse if the institution failed. The President (section 40) sets the national tone, commands the security forces, declares emergencies, and controls treaty domestication; Parliament (sections 73 and 93) supplies the laws the courts apply and domesticates rights instruments; the Judiciary (sections 120, 28 and 124) is where a remedy is actually obtained and where the acts of the first two can be declared void. The Commission, the Board, the Ombudsman and the Police follow as powerful but narrower bodies, and civil society comes last for want of coercive power despite carrying much of the practical load. Close by conceding the strongest counter-argument: the ranking doubles as a ranking by capacity to do harm, since the Presidency commands the forces most often accused of abuse and the Police rank high as guardians of an assembly right they are most often accused of violating. See Part Two.
Question 2. When a State is called to account for failing to protect human
rights, what limits may it lawfully plead, and how far does each reach?
Answer. Four limits recur. Sovereignty resists external interference but cannot escape freely assumed treaty obligations. National security may justify restricting some rights under the Chapter III clawback clauses, but only where genuinely necessary and proportionate, which is the test the Supreme Court applied against the State in Marrah. Derogation in a validly declared public emergency (section 29; ICCPR article
4) is available only in a genuine emergency, only to the extent strictly required, and never against the non-derogable core of life, freedom from torture and slavery, and non-retroactivity; the derogable and non-derogable distinction is the heart of the answer. Progressive realisation of economic and social rights within maximum available resources (ICESCR article 2(1)) excuses a poor State from delivering overnight, but not from taking deliberate steps or meeting the minimum core. The mark is awarded for showing how far each limit reaches, not merely for naming them. See 2.10.
Question 3. Was it wise to consolidate all the amendments into one omnibus
Bill, and which clauses require a referendum?
Answer. A single Bill offers coherence and momentum but forces members to accept rejected clauses to obtain supported ones and obscures where public consent lies, which is what produced the parliamentary deadlock; the better course is to unbundle consensus, non-entrenched provisions from contested, entrenched ones. On the pathway, section 108 lets Parliament alter non-entrenched provisions by a two-thirds majority but requires, for entrenched provisions, a referendum in addition. The entrenched class includes Chapter III and the provisions on the office and election of the President, so the reduced presidential threshold, which alters the provision on the President’s election, cannot properly be enacted without a referendum, and passing it by parliamentary majority alone is open to challenge as invalid. See 5.3.
Question 4. Is the proposed clause on the removal of the Vice-President merely duplicitous of section 54?
Answer. No. Section 54 does extend the presidential removal machinery to the Vice-President, so a bare restatement would add nothing. But the Sam-Sumana removal did not proceed under that machinery: the Supreme Court upheld it on loss of party membership, sidestepping the impeachment route in sections 50 and 51, while the ECOWAS Court found the process defective for want of due process. The existing law therefore left a genuine gap, whether ceasing to belong to a party ends the office, by whose decision, and with what process, and a clause that resolves that gap is not surplusage. A clause that merely repeats section 54 should be rejected; a clause that settles the Sam-Sumana question, with a fair-hearing requirement, should be supported. See 5.2(c) and 3.6.
Question 5. Should a President-elect be sworn in before all election petitions have been cleared?
Answer. Take the middle path. Delaying the oath until petitions are resolved risks leaving the State without an executive and lets a determined loser weaponise petitions to block a transition; swearing in unconditionally risks installing a President a court may unseat. The answer is to swear in on the ordinary timetable so the country is never without a President, but to declare the announced result expressly provisional and to bar the newly sworn President from major irreversible acts, senior appointments, long-term contracts and constitutional moves, until the petition window closes and any challenge is resolved. The post-election limits on the outgoing President serve the same purpose and should dovetail with these. See 5.2(i) and 5.2(j).
Question 6. Analyse the Sam-Sumana litigation and explain what it teaches.
Answer. On 6 March 2015 the APC expelled the Vice-President; on 17 March the President declared him removed and appointed a replacement. The Supreme Court (9 September 2015) upheld the removal on the ground that loss of party membership created a vacancy, not on the impeachment provisions. The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice (2017), applying the African Charter, held the dismissal illegal for want of due process, because the party acted before its own thirty-day internal appeal window had run, and ordered payment of outstanding salary and emoluments; the Government rejected that ruling as beyond the regional court’s jurisdiction. Three lessons: party membership can be a condition of elected office; substance (was there a vacancy) and process (was there due process) are distinct questions that can be answered differently; and the domestic apex court and the regional court can diverge, exposing the enforcement gap in the regional mechanism. See 3.6.
Question 7. Should Sierra Leone create a dedicated human rights court, or a
human rights division of the High Court?
Answer. On balance, yes, and this was the lecturer’s own proposal. The case for it is that channelling rights enforcement through a Supreme Court that is also the constitutional and electoral court means ordinary rights claims wait behind the contests of the powerful, and that a first-instance forum built for the purpose, with appeal upward, would build expertise, clear a distinct list and give rights litigation a settled home instead of forcing claimants either to reach the Supreme Court directly or to shelter a rights claim inside an ordinary action. The counter-arguments are cost, the risk of fragmenting jurisdiction, and the point that the real bottleneck identified in Part Four is funding and reach rather than court structure, so a new court starved of resources would help little. The stronger position supports the reform but pairs it with the funding and access measures without which any forum, new or old, underperforms. See 2.4.
7.2 Further questions for revision
The following are added for revision beyond the questions put in the lecture, with brief pointers to the line an answer should take.
8. “The Office of the President is the most important institution for the protection of human rights in Sierra Leone.” Discuss. Pointer: argue the case from section 40 and the President’s command of the security forces, emergency and treaty powers, then turn it with the observation that the same office is the greatest potential threat, so importance and danger coincide; conclude that the ranking holds but depends wholly on the office-holder’s good faith.
9. Assess the effectiveness of the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone as a protector of rights. Pointer: set the statutory mandate and quasi-judicial powers under the 2004 Act, and the Bumbuna inquiry as the mandate working, against the under-funding and weak enforcement in Part Four; conclude that the Commission is effective at investigation and exposure but weak at compulsion and at reaching the grassroots.
10. How does Marrah v Inspector-General of Police reconcile police powers with the ? Pointer: the police cannot make law by pronouncement; an order restricting a Chapter III right is void unless authorised by Parliament (section 106(9)); and purporting to legislate can amount to usurping Parliament’s function, which section 108(8) treats as treason. Contrast with the negotiated-management model at 2.8.
11. Compare the treatment of executive and State power in Marrah and Pratt. Pointer: both hold the State to lawful process, one against a police pronouncement restricting movement, the other against armed dispossession of titled land without acquisition or compensation; together they show a court willing to enforce Chapter III against the government itself.
12. What does Kabbah v Firetex establish about the scope of presidential immunity under section 48(4)? Pointer: the immunity is a shield against being sued, not a bar on the President suing; access to court, part of the fair-hearing right, is preserved for the office-holder even as the office-holder is protected from suit.
13. Identify the common causes underlying the national challenges to rights protection, and evaluate whether constitutional reform can address them. Pointer: money, reach beyond Freetown, and enforcement of decisions are the recurring causes (4.14); reform reaches the political conditions for rights but not these constraints, so progress on reform is not progress on enforcement.
14. Discuss the tension between customary practice and statutory rights, using inheritance and child marriage as examples. Pointer: the Devolution of Estates Act 2007 and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024 state clear national rules that customary practice frequently overrides where the only accessible forum is customary and no lawyer or paralegal is present; the problem is legal pluralism plus the access gap, not the absence of law.
15. Evaluate the argument that the reduced presidential threshold should not be enacted without a referendum. Pointer: section 42 concerns the election of the President and is entrenched under section 108; entrenched provisions require a referendum in addition to a two-thirds majority; therefore the change is open to challenge as invalid if passed by Parliament alone, independently of its merits.
16. Assess proportional representation as a reform of the electoral system for Parliament. Pointer: weigh fairer vote-to-seat translation, reduced wasted votes and easier delivery of the women’s quota against the loss of the constituency link and the strengthening of party headquarters; support in principle but resist entrenching permanence without a constituency link and a review.
17. Discuss the significance of the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice for the enforcement of rights in Sierra Leone, in light of Sam-Sumana. Pointer: the regional court applies the African Charter directly, offering a remedy where the domestic courts have not, but its judgments depend on domestic compliance, which the Government withheld; the mechanism matters but its enforcement is the weak point, mirroring the domestic enforcement gap.
PART EIGHT: GROUP PREPARATION POINTERS
For group discussion, each group below is given a thesis to defend and the counter-argument to expect, so that preparation runs toward the clash rather than around it.
Group A, the institutions and the hierarchy. Defend the thesis that the Office of the President is rightly ranked first among the protective institutions because it sets the tone, commands the forces, declares emergencies and controls treaty domestication. Expect the counter that the same office is the greatest threat to rights, so that its primacy is a danger as much as a protection, and be ready to answer that the ranking holds but turns entirely on the office-holder’s good faith.
Group B, the Judiciary and a dedicated human rights forum. Defend the thesis that Sierra Leone should create a human rights court or a human rights division of the High Court, because the Supreme Court’s capture by constitutional and electoral litigation leaves ordinary rights claims waiting behind the contests of the powerful. Expect the counter that the real bottleneck is funding and reach, not court structure, and that a new court starved of resources would help little; answer by pairing the new forum with the access and funding measures.
Group C, case law and executive accountability. Defend the thesis that Marrah and Pratt show a judiciary willing to enforce Chapter III against the State itself, and that this is the system’s real achievement. Expect the counter that a handful of Supreme Court cases, reachable only by those who can get to that court, does not amount to protection for the ordinary person; answer by conceding the thinness while defending the principle the cases establish.
Group D, the challenges and the enforcement gap. Defend the thesis that the national challenges share three causes, money, reach beyond Freetown, and the enforcement of decisions, and that these, not any shortage of law, are where the framework breaks. Expect the counter that some challenges, customary practice and legal pluralism above all, are not enforcement problems but genuine conflicts of legal order; answer by distinguishing the enforcement failures from the pluralism problem while showing both trace back to the access gap.
Group E, electoral reform, the threshold and proportional representation. Defend the thesis that the reduced presidential threshold should not be enacted without a referendum, and that proportional representation, though sound in principle, should not be entrenched as permanent without a constituency link and a review. Expect the counter that 50 per cent plus one is the ordinary democratic majority and that PR is fairer, so both should simply be passed; answer on the entrenchment pathway under section 108 and on the value of winner legitimacy and the constituency link.
Group F, removal of the Vice-President and the swearing-in question. Defend the thesis that the removal clause is not duplicitous of section 54 because it resolves the Sam-Sumana gap, and that a President-elect should be sworn in on schedule but barred from irreversible acts until petitions are cleared. Expect the counter that the clause merely repeats section 54, and that either swearing in unconditionally or delaying the oath is cleaner than a middle path; answer from the Sam-Sumana litigation and from the need to avoid both an executive vacuum and an irreversible act by a President a court might unseat.
Legislation and Bills
Abolition of the Death Act 2021 (Act No 12 of 2021)
Anti-Corruption Act 2008 (Act No 12 of 2008), as amended 2019 Child Rights Act 2007 Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991 (Act No 6 of 1991)
Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill 2025 Cyber Security and Crime Act 2021 Devolution of Estates Act 2007 Domestic Violence Act 2007 Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone Act 2004 (Act No 9 of 2004)
Legal Aid Act 2012 (Act No 6 of 2012)
Ombudsman Act 1997 (Act number to be verified)
Persons with Disability Act 2011 (Act No 15 of 2011)
Police Ordinance Cap 150 of 1960; Police Act 1964 Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024 Registration of Customary Marriage and Divorce Act 2007 Sexual Offences Act 2012; Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2019 Cases Ahmed Tejan Kabbah v Firetex (SL) Ltd (Court of Appeal of Sierra Leone, 1996)
Augustine Sorie-Sengbe Marrah v The Inspector-General of Police (Supreme Court of Sierra Leone, 2022)
Sam-Sumana v Attorney-General and Victor Bockarie Foh (Supreme Court of Sierra Leone, 9 September 2015)
Sam-Sumana v Republic of Sierra Leone (ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, 2017)
Theophilus Pratt and Memunatu Pratt v Dr Turad Senesie (Minister of Lands) and Others (Supreme Court of Sierra Leone, 2025)
International and regional instruments
African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (adopted 27 June 1981, entered into force 21 October 1986)
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 23 March 1976), ratified by Sierra Leone 1996 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 3 January 1976), ratified by Sierra Leone 1996 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (adopted 13 December 2006, entered into force 3 May 2008)
Lecture notes, reports and commentary
‘The Role of Key Institutions in the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights in Sierra Leone’ (Topic 2), ‘Examining Successful Human Rights Case Law Jurisprudence at the Domestic Level in Sierra Leone’ (Topic 3) and ‘Challenges in the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights at the National Level in Sierra Leone’ (Topic 4), LLM lecture notes, Faculty of Law, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone (second semester, 2026)
Constitutional Review Committee (chaired by Justice Edmond Cowan), Report (2017); Government of Sierra Leone, White Paper (2022)
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004)
Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone, annual reports on the State of Human Rights in Sierra Leone ConstitutionNet, ‘Sierra Leone’s parliament debates proposed changes to electoral system’ (August 2026) < Africanews, ‘Sierra Leone president presses lawmakers to back contested election reforms’ (10 August 2026) < reporting on the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill 2025 (July–August 2026)
Reporting on the Sam-Sumana litigation and the ECOWAS Court ruling (Peace Insight; ReliefWeb; Globe Afrique, 2015–2017)
Where this note flags a provision, a date or a citation for verification, that flag reflects that the point could not be confirmed to the level stated from the sources available and should be checked before use in court, in an examination, or in academic writing. The current-affairs sources on the 2025 Amendment Bill describe a fast-moving and contested process; the Bill’s final form and status should be re-checked before it is stated as settled law.
‘The Role of Key Institutions in the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights in Sierra Leone’ (Topic 2); ‘Examining Successful Human Rights Case Law Jurisprudence at the Domestic Level in Sierra Leone’ (Topic 3); and ‘Challenges in the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights at the National Level in Sierra Leone’ (Topic 4), LLM lecture notes, Faculty of Law, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone (second semester, 2026).
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991 (Act No 6 of 1991) ch III, ss 15–29. Section 15 is the general recognition provision; the substantive guarantees follow, including the right to life (s 16), personal liberty (s 17), protection from deprivation of property (s 21), protection of privacy of home and property (s 22), the right to a fair hearing (s 23), freedom of conscience (s 24), freedom of expression and of the press (s 25), freedom of assembly and association (s 26), and protection from discrimination (s 27).
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 28 (enforcement of protective provisions), read with s 124 (original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in matters concerning the interpretation and enforcement of the Constitution).
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 171(15).
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 40(4) (the President, subject to ratification by Parliament, may execute treaties). The consequence of dualism is that international instruments bind the State on the international plane but require domesticating legislation to be directly enforceable in the domestic courts.
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The insistence on ranking the institutions “in their hierarchy of importance”, and the ordering that follows, comes from the oral lecture and is not in the circulated note. The lecturer’s stated order was: the Office of the President first, then Parliament, the Judiciary, the Human Rights Commission, the Legal Aid Board, the Ombudsman, the Police, and finally the non-governmental institutions.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 40.
The itemised account of presidential powers that follows, and the argument that each connects to the protection of rights, comes from the oral lecture and is not in the circulated note.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, ss 165–169 (the Armed Forces; the President as Commander-in-Chief). The security forces are simultaneously the guarantor of public order in which rights are enjoyed and, historically, a leading source of their violation, which is why civilian command matters.
The prerogative of mercy is conferred on the President by the Constitution; the exact section should be verified against the primary text before citation. The power gained added significance after the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act 2021 (Act No 12 of 2021) removed the death penalty from the statute book.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 29 (public emergency). The declaration engages the derogation regime discussed at 2.10 below: some rights may be limited during an emergency, but the non-derogable core cannot be touched.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 73 (legislative power vested in Parliament).
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 93 (parliamentary committees and their investigatory functions).
The observation that Parliament can enact rights-eroding as well as rights-protecting law, and that the quality of scrutiny at the law-making stage is therefore decisive, was made orally in the lecture and is not in the circulated note.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 120 (judicial power and the independence of the Judiciary).
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 28 (enforcement) and s 124 (original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in constitutional matters).
The three points that follow, on the Supreme Court’s preoccupation with constitutional and political litigation, the argument for a dedicated human rights court or division, and the Supreme Court’s power to depart from its own decisions, were developed in the oral lecture and are not in the circulated note.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 122 (the Supreme Court as the final court of appeal and its power to depart from its own previous decisions); the precise subsection should be verified against the primary text. This is the doctrinal point the lecturer drew from the Sam-Sumana litigation discussed at 3.6.
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The suggestion that contested constitutional questions, such as those raised by the removal of a Vice-President, could be resolved by a reference for the Supreme Court’s interpretation rather than by unilateral executive action was made in the oral lecture. The channel is the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction over constitutional interpretation under s 124; the precise mechanics of an executive reference should be verified against the Constitution and the Supreme Court Rules.
Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone Act 2004 (Act No 9 of 2004). The circulated note dates the Commission’s enabling statute to 2024. That appears to be a slip: the verified establishing Act is No 9 of 2004, and no separate 2024 statute establishing the Commission could be found. The 2024 date should be corrected to 2004 unless a later re-enactment can be produced and verified against the Gazette.
The emphasis on the Commission’s quasi-judicial powers to compel and to determine complaints, and its reach in principle to business and non-State actors, was drawn out in the oral lecture. The Commission’s functions and powers are set out in the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone Act 2004.
Legal Aid Act 2012 (Act No 6 of 2012) s 2 (establishment of the Legal Aid Board).
The Office of the Ombudsman was established by the Ombudsman Act 1997; the Act number should be verified against the primary text. The office investigates administrative injustice and maladministration by public bodies, complementing rather than replacing the courts. This institution was discussed in the oral lecture and is not in the circulated note.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 155 (establishment of the Sierra Leone Police under the Inspector-General), read with the Police Ordinance Cap 150 of 1960 cited in the circulated note and the Police Act 1964 governing the Force’s functions. The constitutional footing is added here by way of further research; the circulated note cites only the 1960 Ordinance.
The treatment of the policing of protest, negotiated management, and the police professional-development structure that follows was developed in the oral lecture and is not in the circulated note.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 29 (public emergency), read with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 23 March 1976) art 4, which permits derogation in a public emergency threatening the life of the nation, to the extent strictly required, and which lists the non-derogable rights. Sierra Leone ratified the ICCPR in 1996.
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 3 January 1976) art 2(1). Sierra Leone ratified the ICESCR in 1996. Progressive realisation is not a licence for inaction: the obligation to take deliberate, concrete and targeted steps, and the minimum core obligation, are immediate.
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Augustine Sorie-Sengbe Marrah v The Inspector-General of Police (Supreme Court of Sierra Leone, 2022).
The Court’s treatment of the pronouncement as a usurpation of the legislative function, capable of engaging the treason provision in s 108(8), is the sharpest feature of the judgment. It reframes an ordinary rights violation as an on the separation of powers.
Theophilus Pratt and Memunatu Pratt v Dr Turad Senesie (Minister of Lands) and Others (Supreme Court of Sierra Leone, 2025).
The passage of the judgment is paraphrased rather than quoted. The Court also set out criteria for the award of damages for breach of a constitutionally guaranteed right, and awarded damages both for trespass and for the breach of s 21 against the first defendant.
Ahmed Tejan Kabbah v Firetex (SL) Ltd (Court of Appeal of Sierra Leone, 1996).
The split concerned method rather than result: all three judges agreed the President could pursue the appeal; the majority declined to refer the interpretive question to the Supreme Court under s 124, treating the meaning of s 48(4) as clear.
The protests at Bumbuna, in the north of the country, arose from an industrial dispute at a large mining operation in 2012, during which a bystander was killed and others injured in confrontations between striking workers and the police. The year and surrounding facts are widely reported but should be verified before citation in formal work.
The sequence of events (party expulsion on 6 March 2015; the President’s declaration and the appointment of a replacement on 17 March 2015; the asylum bid) is drawn from contemporaneous reporting. The charges levelled by the party included giving false information about an academic qualification, instigating political violence in Kono, attempting to form a breakaway party, and giving false information about his religion.
The Supreme Court reasoned that ceasing to belong to a political party created a vacancy in the vice-presidential office, so that the removal did not require recourse to the parliamentary impeachment procedure in ss 50–51. The decision was controversial and was publicly criticised, including by the plaintiff. The doctrinal point the lecturer drew from it is that the Supreme Court, as the final court, is not bound by its own previous decisions and may depart from them: see 2.4(c).
Sam-Sumana v Republic of Sierra Leone (ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, judgment of 2017). The suit number is not reproduced here because it could not be verified; the substance of the ruling (illegal dismissal for want of due process; violation of the fair-hearing guarantee in the African Charter; order for payment of outstanding salary and emoluments) is drawn from reporting and should be verified against the Court’s own record.
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The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice publicly rejected the ECOWAS Court’s ruling on the ground that the regional court lacked jurisdiction to revisit a matter determined by Sierra Leone’s Supreme Court. The episode illustrates the enforcement gap discussed in Part Four: a favourable regional judgment still depends on domestic compliance.
Overcrowding and prolonged remand detention, concentrated at the Freetown Male Correctional Centre (Pademba Road), are documented in successive reports of the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone, Prison Watch Sierra Leone and international observers. The point connects to Part Two: remand overcrowding is manufactured upstream by arrest, charge and bail practice, not by the correctional service alone.
The 2007 gender legislation (the Domestic Violence Act, the Registration of Customary Marriage and Divorce Act, and the Devolution of Estates Act) and the Sexual Offences Act 2012, later amended in 2019, provide the statutory framework. The gap the circulated note identifies is between these statutes and their enforcement, particularly where customary practice prevails in rural areas. Act titles and years should be verified before formal citation.
The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024 set the minimum age of marriage at 18 and criminalised child marriage; it was widely reported internationally on enactment. It is the strongest recent example of Parliament legislating against a Part Four challenge; whether enforcement follows the enactment is the test the note’s theme predicts.
Persons with Disability Act 2011 (Act No 15 of 2011), which transposed elements of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities into domestic law. The Act establishes a national commission and prohibits discrimination; the circulated note identifies weak enforcement as the problem, not the absence of a statute.
The link is to 2.10(d) and the progressive-realisation standard in art 2(1) of the ICESCR. Genuine resource constraint is a real limit on economic and social rights, but it does not excuse the failure to take deliberate, targeted steps or to meet the minimum core, and it does not explain the failures that cost nothing to fix.
Anti-Corruption Act 2008 (Act No 12 of 2008), amended in 2019, under which the Anti-Corruption Commission investigates and prosecutes corruption without the Attorney-General’s fiat. The existence of the tool does not by itself cure the diversion of resources or the weak oversight of the security forces the circulated note identifies.
The Cyber Security and Crime Act 2021 is the legislation most often cited in this context. The circulated note’s concern is its use against online critics. Set against it is a positive development: the repeal in 2020 of the criminal and seditious libel regime formerly in Part V of the Public Order Act 1965, which had long been used against the press.
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The material on negotiated management and the contrast between the authoritarian and the constitutional handling of protest comes from the oral lecture and is not in the circulated note; it is summarised at 2.8 above and applied here.
On inheritance and land, the Devolution of Estates Act 2007 gives statutory rights that customary practice frequently overrides in practice. On female genital cutting, the legal position applying to adults is contested and evolving, and the practice continues within traditional societies; the current statutory position should be verified before it is stated in formal work rather than asserted from this note.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2004 and recommended, among much else, a reparations programme for victims and structural reforms. The circulated note’s point is that implementation has lagged, in reparations and in mental-health provision, long after the recommendations were made.
This challenge qualifies the account of the Commission at 2.5. The Commission’s mandate and quasi-judicial powers are real, but under-funding and limited enforcement capacity blunt them, particularly at community level where most violations occur and least documentation exists.
The Bill draws on the Justice Edmond Cowan Constitutional Review Committee (relaunched 2013, final recommendations January 2017; Government White Paper January 2022) and the Tripartite Committee formed after the 2023 elections. It was piloted through its readings by the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. Sources: reporting by ConstitutionNet and Africanews, August 2026. These are current-affairs sources; the primary text of the Bill and its final form should be checked against the Gazette.
The APC walked out over the Speaker’s ruling on the required voting threshold and disputed the legality of proceeding without a referendum on entrenched clauses; the SLPP pressed for passage. As of mid-August 2026 the Bill had been reported passed amid an opposition walkout, but its status and validity remained contested, with commentary disputing whether the Constitution had in fact been amended. The position should be re-checked against current sources and the Gazette before it is stated as settled.
The current 55 per cent requirement is in the Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 42(2)(e); its reduction to 50 per cent plus one with a district-spread condition is the most contested clause of the Bill. Because s 42 concerns the election of the President, it is widely regarded as an entrenched provision requiring a referendum, which is the core of the legality dispute noted at 5.1.
Proportional representation has been used in Sierra Leone before as a temporary measure where a constituency delimitation was not ready; the Bill would make a district-block PR system the permanent method for ordinary MPs. The change to the electoral system for Parliament is among the provisions the opposition most strongly resisted.
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The lecturer’s point was that s 54 of the Constitution already extends to the Vice-President the provisions applicable to the President (including the misconduct and removal provisions in ss 50–51), so a fresh clause restating this risks redundancy. Set against that is the Sam-Sumana litigation at 3.6, in which the removal turned not on ss 50–51 at all but on loss of party membership, which is the gap the clause is trying to close. The relevant sections should be verified against the primary text.
The appointment procedure for the Electoral Commission (described in reporting as a Search and Nominations Committee) was among the provisions left unresolved in the parliamentary deadlock. The reform responds to concerns about the independence of the electoral umpire that were prominent after the 2023 elections.
Fixed election dates are among the electoral reforms in the Bill. The reform removes discretion over timing, which can otherwise be used to the advantage of an incumbent.
The 30 per cent women’s quota is one of the few provisions with cross-party support: both the SLPP and the APC have expressed support for it. It builds on the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment framework and responds to the under-representation identified in Part Four at 4.4.
Reporting indicates that Parliament found common ground on removing the clause allowing independent candidates to contest future presidential elections, even as other parts of the Bill remained deadlocked. The analysis therefore treats independent candidacy at the parliamentary level as the live proposal, and notes the removal of the presidential limb.
The reduction of the pre-election resignation period from twelve to six months is described in the lecture as one of the Bill’s provisions. The specific figures should be verified against the text of the Bill, as they could not be independently confirmed from the sources located.
The lecture discussed a proposed change to the petition and results-announcement windows (described as a movement from seven days to three days in one version). The precise figures could not be verified and should be checked against the Bill. The lecturer’s substantive point, made independently of the numbers, was that announced results should be expressly provisional and that swearing-in should not pre-empt the resolution of petitions.
The post-election restrictions on an outgoing President (limiting major appointments, contracts and constitutional changes after a poll) are described in the lecture as provisions of the Bill. The swearing-in question is the lecturer’s, posed to the class for recommendation.
Reporting describes provisions expanding political inclusion for dual citizens, which the APC among others supported. The lecturer linked this to diaspora demands for representation framed as “no taxation, or contribution, without representation.” The 54.
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historic disqualification of dual citizens from Parliament is in the Constitution (the disqualification provision for parliamentary membership); the precise section should be verified.
Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991, s 108 (alteration of the Constitution). Non-entrenched provisions require a two-thirds majority in Parliament; entrenched provisions listed in the section require, in addition, approval at a referendum meeting the stipulated participation and approval thresholds. The precise list of entrenched provisions in s 108(3), and the referendum thresholds, should be verified against the primary text.
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