Sierra Leone has held regular multiparty elections since the end of its civil war in 2002, though the results have sometimes been contested. Demonstrators and opposition parties have faced police violence and restrictions on assembly. Civic groups are constrained, and corruption remains pervasive.

• In January, former President Ernest Bai Koroma (2007–18) was charged with treason for his alleged role in an unsuccessful November 2023 coup d’etat. However, under an agreement that was reportedly brokered by the Economic Community of West African States, he was released later that month to seek medical treatment in Nigeria, and he remained there at year’s end.
• In June, the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and the opposition All People’s Congress (APC) agreed on a roadmap for electoral reforms in keeping with the Agreement for National Unity (ANU), which had been signed in October 2023 to help resolve a dispute over that year’s election results. Implementation of the planned reforms and consensus on their details were still pending as of December.
• In December, Parliament voted to remove the country’s respected auditor-general, Lara Taylor-Pearce, and her deputy at the Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL), endorsing a specially constituted tribunal’s July finding that the two had engaged in professional misconduct in 2021, when they were first suspended. Critics of the move, including international and domestic experts, questioned the credibility of the tribunal process, and opposition lawmakers argued that the vote threshold should have been two-thirds of all members rather than two-thirds of those present. While the ASSL continued to uncover mismanagement of public finances and procurement contracts despite the controversy over its leadership, the transparency of anticorruption efforts and government decisions in general was lacking during the year. For example, the Anti-Corruption Commission sought to collect legally required asset declarations from all public officials, but the content of the declarations remained confidential and not subject to public scrutiny.
• A significant faction of the Sierra Leone Bar Association argued that the group’s leadership elections in May had been fraudulent and politically skewed to favor the interests of the SLPP. In June, a young female lawyer was arrested and detained overnight on charges of online stalking—under the 2021 Cyber Security and Crime Act—after she used social media to criticize President Julius Maada Bio in connection with the disputed Bar Association election.
• A new Criminal Procedure Act, passed in July and signed by the president in September, included a number of provisions aimed at reducing large case backlogs, judicial corruption, and prolonged pretrial detention. Among other changes set to be implemented, the law would eliminate jury trials, impose time limits on pretrial detention, and encourage alternative forms of dispute resolution. Separately in July, the president signed the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, which criminalized all forms of marriage for those under age 18 and assigned penalties for aiding and abetting such marriages.

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For additional background information, see last year’s full report.