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Somalia’s Supreme Court appeared to hand Villa Somalia a defeat on August 24. In reality, the judgment may have delivered Villa Somalia something considerably more valuable than victory in one regional election: judicial recognition of the constitutional order based on the new constitution.
The Court annulled Galmudug’s July 30 parliamentary and local council elections, in which the ruling Justice and Solidarity Party dominated at every level. The Court found that the polls were not administered according to Somalia’s Constitution and electoral laws, nullified and ordered a rerun. For Villa Somalia, this was an immediate political setback, but the constitutional implications run in the opposite direction.
The five-judge bench did not reason from the architecture of Somalia’s original 2012 Provisional Constitution. Its conclusions instead fit the revised constitutional framework adopted in March 2026. Most strikingly, paragraph 75 invokes Article 130 in discussing judicial principles. Under the 2012 Constitution, Article 130 concerned security legislation. In the revised Constitution, Article 130 is the provision on the principles of the judiciary. That distinction is difficult to dismiss as incidental.
The same pattern runs through the Court’s electoral reasoning. The old Article 47 of the 2012 Constitution largely left electoral systems, political parties and the electoral commission to legislation. The revised constitutional framework goes considerably further. Its election chapter constitutionalizes principles governing free and fair elections and restructures the authority of the Independent National Electoral and Boundaries Commission.
The Court then connected those constitutional principles to Articles 77 and 82 of the National Electoral Law. Article 77 requires compliance with electoral law, including by the commission itself. Article 82 provides the sharper instrument: elections conducted outside the prescribed legal framework are “waxba kama jiraan”, null and void.
That is almost precisely the path the judges followed. They concluded that the violations were not merely technical. They affected the integrity and freedom of the election and public confidence in its outcome. The Court therefore declared the election unlawful and void and ordered the electoral commission to conduct another in accordance with the Constitution, Electoral Law, commission legislation and rules governing political organizations.
The irony is considerable. Villa Somalia lost an election result but may have gained constitutional precedent.
Opponents of Hassan Sheikh’s constitutional project, including important federal-state and opposition actors, have maintained that the 2012 Provisional Constitution remains the legitimate constitutional compact. Yet when the Supreme Court applied the revised constitutional architecture to overturn an election favorable to the president’s own party, the central argument was not that the Court had invoked an illegitimate constitution. The political contest instead centered around how the court made the right decision and acceptance by the opposition and Villa Somalia alike.
Towfiiq, for example, which challenged the election, welcomed the judgment. The electoral commission subsequently accepted the ruling, explicitly invoking the Supreme Court’s constitutional role, the supremacy of law and judicial resolution of electoral disputes. More remarkably, the Justice and Solidarity Party, accepted the annulment despite echoing the Commission’s “supremacy of law,” and the constitutional and legal process.
Those celebrating the Court for enforcing the law are also giving practical legitimacy to the legal framework through which the Court reached its result. A constitution becomes authoritative not only when politicians proclaim it so, but when courts apply it, institutions obey judgments grounded in it, political parties submit themselves to it and losing sides return to elections conducted under it.
This does not legally extinguish the dispute over the 2012 Constitution. Nor does one judgment erase objections from Puntland, Jubaland or opposition figures to the constitutional revision process. But constitutional orders are built through practice as much as proclamation.
Villa Somalia therefore suffered a tactical defeat in Galmudug while gaining something strategically significant. Somalia’s highest court applied the revised constitutional framework against the interests of the president’s own political camp, and the institutions affected accepted the result. That gives the new Constitution something political declarations alone could never provide: evidence that it can constrain those who created it.
The judgment was delivered by Chief Justice Baashe Yuusuf Axmed, sitting with Saalax Sh. Ibraahim Dhiblaawe, Cabdulxaq Cumar Maxamed, Cabdulcasiis Maxamed Yuusuf and Xaydar Barqash Abiikar. Their ruling may ultimately be remembered for more than cancelling an election. It may mark the moment Somalia’s revised Constitution began moving from a contested political document towards an operative law of the land.
