Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

In his report on ‘odious debt Odious Debt According to the doctrine, for a debt to be odious it must meet two conditions:
1) It must have been contracted against the interests of the Nation, or against the interests of the People, or against the interests of the State.
2) Creditors cannot prove they they were unaware of how the borrowed money would be used.

We must underline that according to the doctrine of odious debt, the nature of the borrowing regime or government does not signify, since what matters is what the debt is used for. If a democratic government gets into debt against the interests of its population, the contracted debt can be called odious if it also meets the second condition. Consequently, contrary to a misleading version of the doctrine, odious debt is not only about dictatorial regimes.

(See Éric Toussaint, The Doctrine of Odious Debt : from Alexander Sack to the CADTM).

The father of the odious debt doctrine, Alexander Nahum Sack, clearly says that odious debts can be contracted by any regular government. Sack considers that a debt that is regularly incurred by a regular government can be branded as odious if the two above-mentioned conditions are met.
He adds, “once these two points are established, the burden of proof that the funds were used for the general or special needs of the State and were not of an odious character, would be upon the creditors.”

Sack defines a regular government as follows: “By a regular government is to be understood the supreme power that effectively exists within the limits of a given territory. Whether that government be monarchical (absolute or limited) or republican; whether it functions by “the grace of God” or “the will of the people”; whether it express “the will of the people” or not, of all the people or only of some; whether it be legally established or not, etc., none of that is relevant to the problem we are concerned with.”

So clearly for Sack, all regular governments, whether despotic or democratic, in one guise or another, can incur odious debts. ’ commissioned by the UN [1], Robert Howse, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, reminds us that the international law obligation to repay debt has never been accepted as absolute in the course of history. Such obligation is limited in at least two essential respects.

On the one hand, international law states that a government’s primary commitment is to the interests of its population. Indeed the obligation to protect human right sis stronger than any other commitment such as to creditors. This is made clear in Article 103 of the UN Charter. The legal argument of the state of necessity is even more explicit in matter of debt commitments: ‘A State cannot be expected to close its schools and universities and its courts, to disband its public forces and to neglect its public services to such an extent as to expose its community to chaos and anarchy merely to provide the money wherewith to meet its moneylenders, foreign and national. There are limits to what can be reasonably expected of a State in the same manner as with an individual’. [2] The State of necessity and the UN charter thus make it possible for a State to find legal arguments for the unilateral suspension of debt repayment when its finances are not sufficient to both meet the basic needs of the population and meet the needs of its moneylenders. This is obviously the case in Greece today.

We should add that economically speaking suspending debt repayment has most positive consequences. As pointed out by Eduardo Levy Yeyati and Ugo Panizza, two former economists with the Interamerican Development Bank, after their enquiry into some forty countries’ defaulting, ‘default episode seems to mark the beginning of the economic recovery’. [3] Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate for Economy, also insists that the dramatic consequences of a moratorium on debt as announced by creditors to scare the debtor country are just not true: ‘Empirically, there is little evidence in support of the position that a default leads to an extended period of exclusion from the market. […] Thus, in practice, the threat of credit being cut off appears not to be effective.’ [4]

On the other, the obligation to pay a debt only holds if the commitment is valid, irrespective of the State’s financial situation. As pointed out by Howse, the principle of State continuity and contract law are limited by concerns about fairness, evasion, fundamental change in circumstances, bad faith, the signatory’s incompetency, law abuse, etc.

A commission to audit the Greek debt (with citizens’ participation) would make it possible to accurately identify irregularities in the way those debts were contracted, beginning with the debt owed to the Troika Troika Troika: IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank, which together impose austerity measures through the conditions tied to loans to countries in difficulty.

IMF : https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/html/index.en.html  (IMF IMF
International Monetary Fund Along with the World Bank, the IMF was founded on the day the Bretton Woods Agreements were signed. Its first mission was to support the new system of standard exchange rates.

When the Bretton Wood fixed rates system came to an end in 1971, the main function of the IMF became that of being both policeman and fireman for global capital: it acts as policeman when it enforces its Structural Adjustment Policies and as fireman when it steps in to help out governments in risk of defaulting on debt repayments.

As for the World Bank, a weighted voting system operates: depending on the amount paid as contribution by each member state. 85% of the votes is required to modify the IMF Charter (which means that the USA with 17,68% % of the votes has a de facto veto on any change).

The institution is dominated by five countries: the United States (16,74%), Japan (6,23%), Germany (5,81%), France (4,29%) and the UK (4,29%).
The other 183 member countries are divided into groups led by one country. The most important one (6,57% of the votes) is led by Belgium. The least important group of countries (1,55% of the votes) is led by Gabon and brings together African countries.

http://imf.org , European Union, European Central Bank Central Bank The establishment which in a given State is in charge of issuing bank notes and controlling the volume of currency and credit. In France, it is the Banque de France which assumes this role under the auspices of the European Central Bank (see ECB) while in the UK it is the Bank of England.

ECB : http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/home.aspx ) which amounts to about 80% of the total debt in the wake of its bailing out private banks in 2010 and 2012. Indeed loans granted to Greece by the Troika from 2010 were largely intended to pay creditors, mainly French and German banks that half of all Greek debt securities before the Troika stepped in.

A number of irregularities attached to this intervention shed doubt on the validity of debt commitments that are so close to the hearts of Herr Junker and Mme Lagarde.

The Troika’s memoranda infringe a number of basic rights

The Troika is guilty of law abuse, to start with. As pointed out by the UN Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt and human rights in 2012, private companies and creditors must ‘ensure that compliance with the commitments derived from foreign debt would not undermine the obligations for the realization of fundamental economic, social and cultural rights, as provided for in the international human rights instruments.’ [5] Now the Troika did profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. from Greece’s financial distress to enforce austerity policies (memoranda) in exchange for the loans.

Moreover these austerity measures are illegal in the context of Greek national law but also of European and international law. In a report commissioned by the Vienna Chamber of Labour [6], lawyer Andreas Fischer-Lescano convincingly argues that the Troika’s Memoranda encroach on a number of human rights such as the rights to health care Care Le concept de « care work » (travail de soin) fait référence à un ensemble de pratiques matérielles et psychologiques destinées à apporter une réponse concrète aux besoins des autres et d’une communauté (dont des écosystèmes). On préfère le concept de care à celui de travail « domestique » ou de « reproduction » car il intègre les dimensions émotionnelles et psychologiques (charge mentale, affection, soutien), et il ne se limite pas aux aspects « privés » et gratuit en englobant également les activités rémunérées nécessaires à la reproduction de la vie humaine. , education, housing, social security, a decent wage, private property but also freedom of association and of collective negotiation. These various rights are indeed protected by several legal agreements and conventions that are binding not only for States but for European and international institutions such as those of which the Troika consists.

The validity of the memoranda and of the loans they are attached to is also questioned by the fact that according to European treaties the Troika is not competent to take any measure that affect the right to strike and to form associations, the right to proper health care and education, or the way wages and salaries are negotiated. Finally leaving the European Parliament out in the drafting and signature of the memoranda encroaches on the principle of separation of powers that is protected by European treaties.

Those various legal encroachments allow Greece to repudiate its commitments to implement austerity measures and to repay its debt to the Troika.

They also highlight the gap between the IMF’s and European Commission’s own commitments and what is actually happening. In this respect, Mme Lagarde should perhaps check the first article of the IMF’s statutes which says that one of the purposes of the institution is to contribute to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members. [7]