Paris Club (The)

Global Famine

1 June 2008

Humanity is undergoing in the post-Cold War era an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the World population. National economies are collapsing, unemployment is rampant. Local level famines have erupted in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America. This "globalization of poverty" —which has largely reversed the achievements of post-war decolonization— was initiated in the Third World coinciding with the debt (...)

You, Argentina, 5 years on...

30 December 2006

Argentina, you have been much talked about since the night of 19 to 20 December 2001 when after three years of economic recession your people went down into the streets to shout their rejection of the neoliberal policies led by Fernando De la Rua and his sinister minister of the Economy, Domingo Cavallo. You showed the world that citizens can change the course of history. Argentina, those events that resulted in the December 2001 uprising started with the IMF decision not to grant an (...)

International press

At 50, is the Paris Club a colonial relic?

3 July 2006

In a recent statement on the 50th anniversary of the Paris Club, a powerful creditors’ cartel based in France, anti-debt groups described the club’s policies toward borrowing nations as "medieval". But some say the word "colonial" is equally fitting. Made up of 19 of the world’s richest nations, the Paris Club was formed in 1956 as an informal group of creditor governments to manage their collective debt portfolio. It has since evolved into one of many foreign policy tools that one-time (...)

Press Release

Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt calls for the end of the Paris Club

15 May 2006

Paris, AFP (France Press Agency) - In a communiqué Monday, the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM) called for the “absolute suppression” of the Paris Club, a “true institutional anomaly” that celebrates its fiftieth birthday on Tuesday, “to finally achieve a total cancellation of the Southern countries’ debt”. “A true institutional anomaly, the Paris Club has neither a legal existence nor status. It is a ‘non institution’ at the heart of international financial relations,” (...)

The Debt Tsunami

30 January 2005