South Sudan Amendments

South Sudan’s cabinet has approved amendments to the 2018 peace deal to clear legal obstacles before elections scheduled for December 2026. (radiotamazuj.org) Information minister Ateny Wek Ateny said the Council of Ministers, chaired by President Salva Kiir, unanimously endorsed the Amendment Bill 2026. The cabinet action follows an expanded presidency meeting in Juba on December 17, 2025, that first signed off on the changes. (africa-press.net) (radiotamazuj.org) The main change is that elections would no longer depend on finishing a permanent constitution first. Instead, the vote would be run under South Sudan’s 2011 Transitional Constitution, as amended. (radiotamazuj.org) Other revisions push the national population and housing census to after the election, shorten the timetable for amending the National Elections Act to two months, and move the deadline for publishing the final voter register from six months to three months before polling. (radiotamazuj.org) South Sudan has never held a national election since independence in 2011. The current transition traces back to a civil war that erupted in 2013 and a peace accord signed on September 12, 2018, by Kiir, First Vice President Riek Machar, and other parties. (peaceagreements.org) (news.un.org) The election was supposed to happen in December 2024, but the parties extended the transition to February 2027 and postponed the vote to December 2026. United Nations envoy Nicholas Haysom told the Security Council in November 2024 that the delay reflected “political paralysis and inaction” in implementing the peace deal. (news.un.org) The government’s argument now is that some benchmarks cannot be finished before December. African Union envoy Jakaya Kikwete said this month that South Sudan and the African Union had agreed to sequence some reforms after the election, including the constitutional review, census, and parts of security-sector reform. (eyeradio.org) That approach has critics inside South Sudan. Edmond Yakani, head of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, said delinking the vote from the census and permanent constitution may be practical, but he warned that leaders must still use the amendment procedure in Article 8.4 of the peace deal and fully fund the National Elections Commission. (eyeradio.org) The amendment bill still needs review through the Reconstituted Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission and ratification by the national legislature. If those steps are completed, South Sudan’s leaders will have less than eight months to turn the legal rewrite into an actual vote in December 2026. (radiotamazuj.org)