Under the law, there are three ways in which the Parliament of Nauru can be dissolved:

1. If Parliament continues for its full 3 year term, it dissolves automatically three years after the date of the first sitting – see Art 41(7) of the Constitution of Nauru.
2. If the President has declared a state of emergency, he can dissolve Parliament via emergency order (as was done in 2004, 2008 and 2010 – due to Parliament deadlock) – see Art 77 and 78.
3. If the President advises the Speaker to dissolve Parliament at any time before the end of Parliament’s 3 year term, the Speaker can dissolve Parliament in accordance with Article 41 of the Constitution. The Speaker must refer the advice to Parliament within 14 days after receiving the advice. Except under very limited circumstances, he is obliged to dissolve Parliament on the 7^th day after the advice has been referred to Parliament.

The current dispute revolves around the purported dissolution of Parliament via the third of the methods listed above, that is, by the Speaker under Article 41. In particular, it revolves around the interpretation of Article 41, and the meaning of ‘referring’ the President’s advice to Parliament. The facts underlying the dispute are set out below.

On 27 February, the President wrote to the Speaker and advised him to dissolve Parliament. The President’s stated reason for this advice was that after considering the current political situation he had formed the view that ‘we cannot reach consensus to continue to run my government with integrity and stability.’ This was a reference to the recent resignation (on 8 and 13 February) of two Ministers, the sacking (on 11 February) of one Minister by the President, and the appointment (on 21 February) of 2 members of the opposition to be Cabinet Ministers.

But two weeks before the President gave the advice to dissolve Parliament, 9 members of Parliament had written to the Speaker requesting that he call a sitting under Article 42 of the Constitution, and advising him they would be moving of a motion of no confidence in the President and Ministers. The successful passage of such motion requires at least half of the total number of members of Parliament to vote in favour, that is, 9 members. Those signing the petition included the three (now former) Ministers mentioned above, as well as two Ministers who were and are still in Cabinet. The Speaker replied to them on 12 February, declining their petition for a sitting on the grounds that the Supreme Court has previously held that Article 42 is defective and cannot be relied upon.

Instead, the Speaker, in exercise of his power under Article 41(3), called a sitting of Parliament for Friday 1 March, for the purpose of referring the President’s advice to Parliament. At the sitting, the Speaker read out the President’s advice, made a brief statement, and then adjourned the House sine die – that is, indefinitely.

The following Monday, 4 March, 7 members of Parliament (all of those who had signed the letter of intention to move a motion of no confidence, except the two who are still in Cabinet) filed an action in the Supreme court against the Speaker, arguing that the Speaker had acted in contravention of Article 41 by denying members the opportunity to consider the President’s advice to dissolve Parliament. The members originally sought an order forcing the Speaker to call another sitting of Parliament, an order prohibiting the Speaker from dissolving Parliament until he had called another sitting at which the President’s advice to dissolve could be properly considered, and a declaration that the Speaker’s actions where incorrect.

The Speaker argued that he had complied with the requirements of Article 41 by reading the President’s advice to the House before adjourning, and that there are no express words in Article 41 requiring the Speaker to give members the opportunity to consider and debate the President’s advice.

The Chief Justice handed down his decision on Wednesday 6 March. He upheld the plaintiffs’ contentions as to the meaning of Article 41 and issued the following declaration:

‘That by his action on 1^st March 2013 in adjourning the Parliament sine die, the Speaker acted in contravention of Article 41(4) of the Constitution of Nauru, which requires that Members of Parliament on being referred by the Speaker the advice from the President to dissolve the Parliament, must be given the opportunity to consider that advice, to decide whether to adopt courses of action provided for by Article 24 and 41, and to vote on any such proposed course of action.’

The remedy which the Court granted to the plaintiffs was a declaration; it was not an injunction which could compel the Speaker or prohibit him from doing something.

Following the decision it was widely expected that the Speaker would appoint a time for a sitting to be held at which the President’s advice to dissolve would be properly referred and considered, and that the 7 day period under Article 41(4) would then begin to run from that date.

However, in spite of the Supreme Court decision, the President on 7 March advised the Speaker of the date of the proposed election under Article 39, and on 8 March, 7 days after the 1 March sitting at which the President’s advice to dissolve was read out in Parliament, the Speaker dissolved Parliament and issued writs for a general election to be held on 6 April 2013.

The plaintiffs in the first matter are expected to file further proceedings in the Supreme Court of Nauru this week in order to challenge the lawfulness of the dissolution.

It’s like clockwork, really. Someone stumbles across a story purporting to show the benighted and backward peoples of some far corner of the world, and everyone jumps up, bemoaning the fact that, in this day and age, people are still capable of ignorance, superstition and occasionally, brutality to others.

This month’s installment comes to us courtesy of new media. Mobile phone photographs of the torture and execution of a woman from the highlands of Papua New Guinea caused a global furore, typified by the Global Mail’s supercilious headline: It’s 2013, And They’re Burning ‘Witches’.

Who is this ‘they’ you keep talking about?

It’s really hard to know where to begin with a story like this. Yes, witchcraft, magic and sorcery are still practiced widely – not only in Papua New Guinea, but in many parts of the world. To give you an idea how ingrained it remains in some societies, Vanuatu recently saw a man plead guilty to it. Yes, he himself believed that he had injured someone by magical means.

Happily, in the rest of the world, such superstitious folderol no longer exists, right? In place of magic, we have graduated to ghosts, angels and auras, terrorists, extra-terrestrials and illegal aliens. Honestly, do we even pause to see what’s on the (so-called) Discovery channel before writing headlines like this?

Sure, you reply, but at least we don’t lynch people any more. We don’t drag them from their home, cut them with bush knives, shave their head, douse them with acid and then burn them alive. That would be a fair point, if it were true.

Read any national news service long enough and it’s bound to come out – whether it’s a gang rape in India, an honour killing in Pakistan or in the London suburbs, murder of albinos in central Africa, race-baiting in the American south or gay-bashing in Moscow… it’s still there. Everywhere you look, the weak and the outcast are preyed upon. It’s not happening everywhere all the time, but it’s happening.

And yes, it’s unutterably wrong.

It’s also innately human. It may come from our most bestial nature, and rule of law does sometimes operate to curb it, but cruelty, victimisation and scapegoating remain essential, albeit shameful, parts of human nature. If you live in a society with a functioning police force and a more liberal set of social standards backed by solid legislation, you may be able to operate under the illusion that such inclinations have somehow been expunged from your nature. As someone who is dealing (not abstractly, but right here, right now) with the threat of violence in a society that condones it, let me assure you: it has not.

Good laws may help, if only to raise awareness and make it a matter of public record that violent abuse, no matter what motivates it, is simply wrong. But having laws on the books serves no purpose if society itself chooses not to reject this behaviour. And frankly, that won’t happen if one half of it is busy sitting back and castigating the other.

There is nothing easier than name-calling when someone’s already called you names. So my advice to you holier-than-thou commentators is to try a different tack. Start from the assumption that we are, all of us, beasts at our core, with only social opprobrium and the policeman on the corner to hold us back.

Napoleon’s famous observation about a world power built from a nation of shopkeepers can guide us to a useful next step. The more our day-to-day lives are invested in peace, politeness and order, the more reason we have to use the state’s resources to defend good behaviour. Never forget that, no matter how difficult it may be to accept, the violent abuse of vulnerable people is more often than not punishment for social transgression. The secret therefore, is to change what is seen as transgression. We achieve this by embracing others, welcoming them into the fold, and sharing our prosperity, wealth and values.

Facile, mocking headlines decrying the Other take us in exactly the opposite direction.

By the way, did nobody else remark upon the fact that, were it not for mobile technology, this killing –like the countless others that came before– would never even have been remarked upon? The very fact that the criminal act was recorded and disseminated speaks to an opportunity for change. If, that is, we get past our own prejudices and embrace it.

Timor-Leste’s indefatigable finance minister, Emilia Pires, spoke about the g7+ group of fragile countries when she delivered the Development Policy Centre’s inaugural Harold Mitchell lecture in November 2012.  She chairs the g7+ and is also a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the post-2015 international development agenda, charged with quite rapidly developing broad recommendations on what should follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) upon their expiry in 2015.  Wearing both of these hats, she convened an international conference on the post-2015 development agenda last week in Dili.  This brought together nearly 50 countries—g7+ members, Pacific island countries, Portuguese-speaking African countries and development partners—to discuss how the specific development challenges faced by fragile and conflict-affected states should be reflected in the post-2015 framework.  You can read the Dili Consensus here, and also the outcomes of related discussions among Pacific island countries here [pdf].

Under the Development Policy Centre’s partnership with the Pacific Institute of Public Policy(PIPP), I was part of a team that provided some facilitation for the Dili conference, before and during the event.  I discuss below five specific points about the conference and its outcomes that I think are particularly noteworthy.  While I’m generally content to observe the smokestacks of the post-2015 industry from a safe distance, and am not a fervent believer in the value of UN high-level panels, I do think Timor-Leste’s decision to convene this discussion was a wise and well-timed one.

First, the Dili conference was, to my knowledge, the first such interaction between two quite different types of fragile state—one type being conflict-affected, the other geographically vulnerable.  Fragile states lack a bloc identity.  Even the typology of fragile states is a fraught business—for example, the OECD counts 47 of them and the World Bank 35, while neither the OECD nor the Bank counts certain countries that consider themselves obviously fragile.  In contributing to some background work for this conference, I found a useful starting point was simply to look at the intersection of three groups: the two mentioned above and the group of 49 Least-Developed Countries.  This gives 23 “core fragile” states that face challenges in multiple dimensions, including 16 of the 18 g7+ members.  This core group can then be enlarged in various directions, for example by including countries experiencing transitory conflict, or exhibiting high levels of climate change vulnerability with low adaptive capacity.  However they are defined, fragile states are diverse.  They are also more than usually preoccupied with their own challenges.  For both of these reasons, they have tended not to caucus or search for common ground.  The formation of the g7+ group has begun to change that; the Dili conference was another step toward building a sense of collective, if loose, identity among fragile states.

Second, in the context of MDG achievement, the most general point of commonality between fragile states is that they are all on the wrong side of the implacable average.  The eight MDGs as originally formulated were global goals.  The 21 associated targets were not intended to be applied to individual countries but, inevitably, they are so applied in countless reporting documents.  When targets defined for the average country get applied to every country, a lot of countries will necessarily get fail grades—including most of the countries represented in Dili, for most targets.  Even countries that have done remarkably well on some things in absolute terms get marked down in terms of proportional progress, simply because their starting points were so bad.  (This is one frequently-remarked problem with the MDGs, on which Terence Wood has recently written here.)  Fragile states therefore need to be able to set their own, realistic targets that are aligned with, rather than inherited from, a global framework.

Third, in discussing the more truck-sized gaps in the MDG framework, much common ground emerged.  Some countries were concerned primarily about peace-building, others primarily about climate change mitigation and adaptation (President Anote Tong of Kiribati, a core fragile state, spoke compellingly on this).  But all countries agreed on the centrality of inclusive economic growth and state effectiveness—with variations in emphasis according to whether a country’s growth depends more upon natural or human resources, or whether the quality of its government is impeded more by problems of institutional capacity or political legitimacy.  In effect, the outcome saw the concerns of the g7+ group of countries, already quite well encapsulated in the peace-building and state-building goals that were incorporated into the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States [pdf] in 2011, augmented by the climate-centred concerns of the Pacific island countries.  The result was the identification of four goal areas requiring attention by the High-Level Panel, which can be roughly labelled inclusive growth, peace and justice, state effectiveness, and climate change.

Fourth, the discussion was not dominated by calls for aid.  Indeed, a strong theme of the conference was the need for fragile and conflict-affected countries to diagnose and take responsibility for their own problems, with support rather than direction from donors.  At the same time, there was a clear message that many of the challenges facing this group of countries can only be overcome through external or global collective action.  Most obviously, curbing greenhouse gas emissions depends upon collective action by major emitters, and adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change will require the construction of accessible and responsive financing and advisory mechanisms at the global and regional levels.  Sustainable and equitable management of natural resource wealth in fragile states depends in part on how developed countries regulate the activities of multinational corporations.  And growth through employment depends in part on developed-country policies with respect to international labour mobility.  In these and other areas, fragile and conflict-affected countries would be beneficiaries of, much more than contributors to, progress toward appropriately-defined global goals.

Fifth, while the Dili conference was not intended to be, and was not, a technical discussion about the precise framing of goals, the formulation of targets or the selection of indicators, it did raise two quasi-technical questions.  One question is whether there should be “how” goals in the post-2015 framework, rather than just “what” goals.  The g7+ narrative has sometimes spoken of the need for “precursor” goals or targets related to peace, justice and state effectiveness.  Another question is whether there should be goals that call explicitly for global collective action.  A peace goal, for example, could in principle be defined in this way; a climate change mitigation goal, one might assume, would have to be so defined.  However, moving in either of these directions takes us away from something that is generally agreed to be the most desirable feature of the present MDGs—that they define concrete goals for human well-being to which people, or at least politicians, can readily relate.  The average person does not aspire to live in a country with competent public financial management; it’s the benefits of such management that they want.  Nor does the average person aspire to live in a world which has negotiated a particular kind of climate change agreement; it’s the benefits of such an agreement that they want.  Once you go beyond social development objectives, expressing global goals in terms of human well-being gets harder.  It might well be possible to do so without sinking into a quicksand of debates about what are the precursors or ingredients of development.  Let’s hope so, or the Dili storyline might not make it out of the foundry.

What next?  Well, Emilia Pires now has much stronger backing vocals when she goes to the next High-Level Panel meeting in Bali at the end of this month.  It seems even more inconceivable than it was previously that the post-2015 framework would omit goals relating in one way or another to inclusive growth, peace and justice, state effectiveness and climate change.  However, it remains entirely open how such goals might be articulated.  Any excessive prescriptiveness about how governments govern and function, or about the outcomes of multilateral negotiations, will quickly propel discussions into a cul-de-sac.  Maintaining focus on why things matter to people—and on the ends rather than the means—is the more promising path.  I don’t know whether the post-2015 process, as it has been constituted, will eventually produce a simple and rational outcome, or have much impact in terms of national policy-making, global collective action or the volume and distribution of aid.  I do believe, though, that Timor-Leste did something very useful by bringing together this diverse group of countries for the first time on its soil.  Fragile states are now a little less a fuzzy statistical category, and a little more an organised grouping with a shared view of their aspirations for the future.

Robin Davies is Associate Director of the Development Policy Centre.