Procédure de révision constitutionnelle : Pourquoi la majorité des trois cinquièmes ne suffit pas à valider définitivement la réforme
The legal debate surrounding draft law no. 17/2026 on constitutional revision has taken a major technical turn. An interpretation is circulating according to which any text adopted by a three-fifths majority of the members of parliament would be definitively approved and ready to be transmitted to the President of the Republic for promulgation. However, a strict analysis of the texts demonstrates that this interpretation is not supported by Article 103 of the Constitution, nor by the historical jurisprudence of the Constitutional Council, particularly Decision no. 3/C/2005 of January 18, 2006.
Indeed, the fundamental charter establishes a principle of procedural separation. Article 103 of the Constitution clearly distinguishes between the adoption of a revision and its approval. The standardized procedure established by the drafters is clear: after its formal adoption by the National Assembly according to the required rules, the revision, in principle, only becomes final after being approved by the people through a referendum.
Those who advocate for purely parliamentary validation often cite Constitutional Council Decision No. 3/C/2005 to justify the completeness of the vote by the members of parliament. This overlooks the analysis of paragraph 6 of that same decision. The constitutional judges specify therein that approval is only obtained by a three-fifths majority of votes cast when the President of the Republic decides, on his own initiative, to submit the text solely to the National Assembly, instead of a referendum. The phrase "In this case," isolated in the last paragraph of Article 103, refers exclusively to this scenario of prior presidential arbitration.
The often-cited legal shortcut—derived from recital 10 of the 2006 decision—stating that “in the case of constitutional revision by the National Assembly alone, a three-fifths qualified majority vote constitutes both the adoption and the approval of the law,” cannot be separated from the circumstances of the time. In 2006, the case concerned a draft constitutional law presented by the President of the Republic, who had expressly chosen, by decree, the parliamentary route. It was only in this top-down context (from the Executive to the Legislature) that the qualified majority could simultaneously constitute adoption and approval.
The current political and legal situation is fundamentally different from the 2006 jurisprudence. Firstly, the text under consideration is a proposed constitutional amendment of strictly parliamentary origin. Secondly, and decisively, the President of the Republic has already decided on the text's path. In Opinion No. 594 of June 19, 2026, addressed directly to the President of the National Assembly, the Head of State, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, expressly indicated that he favored a referendum.
Therefore, in the absence of an explicit presidential decision substituting parliamentary procedure for a referendum, the National Assembly's vote remains legally incomplete. Even if the majority of deputies reach the three-fifths threshold, this vote cannot in any way produce the effects of final approval. Attempting to transmit the text to the Presidential Palace for immediate promulgation would demonstrate a blatant disregard for the provisions of Article 103 and a misinterpretation of the Constitutional Council's jurisprudence, the scope of which remains strictly limited to the prior decisions of the Executive branch.
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