Aware of their position as outsiders, foreign judges tend to focus on interpreting the text of a country’s constitution based on what they see as the authors’ original intent, which makes them less likely to make decisions that create social change, Dziedzic said.

Their presence is also part of a broader challenge that Pacific nations face as they consider how to calibrate legal systems that draw on both Indigenous customs and Western legal traditions that were imported during colonisation.

In recent years, Samoa, for example, has enacted sometimes contentious constitutional changes to “put more Indigenous customary Samoan values into the constitution to balance what they saw as a kind of Western influence,” Dziedzic said.

Patrick Fepulea’i, a Samoan lawyer, said that although local judges were sometimes less experienced than foreign ones, they were better equipped to handle issues involving local customs and traditions.

Samoa’s district courts and Supreme Court are now fully staffed by local judges, he said, a shift that has been broadly welcomed by the public. The next step, he said, will be to localise the highest bench, the Court of Appeal, whose three current judges are from New Zealand.

“That’s what, I suppose, any country like ours is aspiring to: that one day, all our courts will be manned by local judges,” he said.

Those foreign judges who remain in Pacific nations can face political vulnerabilities and questions of allegiance that local judges do not have to contend with.

Kiribati is just one of the countries that have tried to remove foreign judges. In 2014, Nauru deported its only magistrate and cancelled the visa of its chief justice. The same year, the island nation of Timor-Leste dismissed all foreign judicial staff members and ordered five judges, two prosecutors and one adviser to immediately leave the country. Critics in both instances said the government’s actions were politically motivated.

As to Kiribati, the president suspended the five high-level foreign judges after they either challenged the government or made rulings against it over actions they deemed unlawful. In response, the president, Taneti Maamau, accused them of being “neocolonial” actors trying to undermine Kiribati’s sovereignty.

At the centre of the crisis is David Lambourne, an Australian who became a High Court judge in the island nation in 2018. Lambourne said the appointment had been uncontroversial until his wife, Tessie Lambourne, a native of Kiribati, became the country’s opposition leader in 2020. After that, the government tried to limit the length of his appointment, which he said had carried no fixed term.

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In 2021, the government informed him that he would not be granted another work visa unless he signed a new contract limiting his appointment to three years, according to court documents. He lodged a court appeal, calling the move unconstitutional.

The chief justice at the time, William Hastings, a current New Zealand judge seconded to Kiribati ruled in Lambourne’s favour – and was then suspended by the government over allegations of misconduct, along with Lambourne.

Lambourne was locked out of Kiribati during the pandemic but was able to return on a visitor’s visa in August 2022. After he arrived, the government twice tried to deport him, once accusing him of posing an unspecified security threat. In both instances, the deportation was stopped by the Court of Appeal, staffed by three judges from New Zealand.

In September, the government suspended all three appeals court judges, leaving the nation of 120,000 people with no judges above the magistrate level.

Maamau has accused the suspended judges, in numerous public statements, of trying to consolidate their own power by helping to secure a lifetime appointment for Lambourne.

“It is disheartening to see neocolonial forces weaponising the laws that have been enacted to protect a Kiribati person to pursue their own interest, and suppress the will of the people,” he said in a statement.

Semilota’s appointment to acting chief justice “meets the judiciary’s aspiration over the past few years to localise this important position,” a spokesperson for Maamau said in an emailed statement.

Lambourne said the government’s actions were politically motivated and aimed at his wife, who has been a vocal critic of Maamau’s moves to align Kiribati with China and withdraw from key regional bodies.

“I believe that this is an attempt by the government to force me out of the office and force me out of Kiribati in the very misguided belief that if I wasn’t here, Tessie would have to leave politics,” Lambourne said in a telephone interview.

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He added that all five foreign judges had been appointed by Maamau, 62, who has been president for six years.

“For him to turn around now and say ‘It’s all these white people trying to protect each other’ is nothing more than blatant racism on his part,” Lambourne said.

Tess Newton Cain, project leader of the Pacific Hub at the Australia-based Griffith Asia Institute, said the crisis raised concerns about the state of democracy in Kiribati.

Without a functioning judiciary to keep the government in check, “if the government exercises power unlawfully or acts in ways that restrict democratic process, there’s nowhere to go to have that decision or exercise of power challenged,” she said.

The Kiribati government’s actions have been criticised by legal and human rights bodies. Diego García-Sayán, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, called the suspension of the judges without due process “a huge blow to judicial independence.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.