6 - After Independence: Sovereign Status and the Republic of Nauru

Summary

Chapter 6 is the conclusion of the book. It provides a brief account of the post-independence trajectory of the republic, focusing on the outcomes of the ‘Certain Phosphate Lands Case’ in the International Court of Justice 1992, and the impact of Australia’s offshore detention regime on the rule of law in Nauru in the 2010s. The chapter argues that the now notorious ‘failures’ of the republic identified by the Constitutional Review Committee in 2007 – ‘failure of institutions’; ‘lack of motivation or incentive to preserve wealth for the future, and account for its management’; ‘absence of machinery for enforcing accountability and transparency’; ‘failure of leaders to learn the lessons of good governance’ – must be understood as fundamentally continuous with imperial administrative practices of the pre-independence era, and not as originating with the Nauruan community itself following independence. Noting the reassertion of new forms of imperial intervention in Nauru, the chapter concludes that questions of decolonisation remain as urgent today as they were in 1968.