THE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT FRAMEWORK: The Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025

The Constitutional Amendment Framework provides a non-partisan assessment of the constitutional procedure governing the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025. The report examines the Bill through the requirements of section 108 of the 1991 Constitution, distinguishing between procedural fidelity, substantive fidelity and democratic legibility. It maps the proposed amendments provision by provision, identifies amendments that independently engage the referendum requirement, and examines the consequences of combining entrenched and non-entrenched provisions within a single constitutional amendment Bill. The Framework develops a Section 108 Compliance Matrix and introduces the concepts of Entrenchment Spillover, Constitutional Package Compression, Democratic Legibility, and the Constitutional Chain of Custody as tools for assessing constitutional amendment procedure and public accountability. Particular attention is given to Gazette publication, the separate two-thirds parliamentary requirements at Second and Third Readings, referendum requirements, documentary provenance, and the need for constitutional compliance to be demonstrable from the official record. This report is the companion to A Constitutional Translation Audit: The Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025. While the Translation Audit asks what happened to reform proposals as they moved into the Bill, this Framework asks what must happen before the resulting constitutional amendments can become law. The report takes no position for or against the Bill or any individual amendment. Its purpose is to provide Parliament, civil society, legal practitioners, researchers and the public with a transparent framework for evaluating the constitutional amendment process.