Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

Below are the different themes that were studied, with the written, audio, video and photo, documents concerning these three rich, instructive and agreeable days.

• The public debt in Eastern Europe

• How to manage an audit

• States under Troïka : the current situation ?

• The toxic loans to public institutions

• What is social debt ?

• History of debt abolition
  Les luttes pour l’annulation des dettes aux temps bibliques et dans la Rome antique
  A Canaan, la lutte des peuples contre l’esclavage de la dette s’inscrit parfaitement dans le cadre qu’Éric Toussaint a tracé pour la Mésopotamie. Nous allons y retrouver les mêmes mécanismes d’oppression, les mêmes révoltes, animées cependant par un élément plus spécifique : l’action des prophètes.

• Ecological debt : origins and current affairs

• A post-extractionist society : let’s discuss it

• Land grabbing and extrativism VS the rights of Nature and food sovereignty

• Rwanda and Haïti : two emblematic cases of illegitimate and/or 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.

• Microcredit : a means of feminine emancipation ?

• Capitalism : a transmition belt for patriarchy

• Vulture funds Vulture funds
  Vulture fund Investment funds who buy, on the secondary markets and at a significant discount, bonds once emitted by countries that are having repayment difficulties, from investors who prefer to cut their losses and take what price they can get in order to unload the risk from their books. The Vulture Funds then pursue the issuing country for the full amount of the debt they have purchased, not hesitating to seek decisions before, usually, British or US courts where the law is favourable to creditors. , ICSID ICSID The International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) is a World Bank arbitration mechanism for resolving disputes that may arise between States and foreign investors. It was established in 1965 when the Washington Convention of that year entered into force.
  
  Contrary to some opinions defending the fact that ICSID mechanism has been widely accepted in the American hemisphere, many States in the region continue to keep their distance: Canada, Cuba, Mexico and Dominican Republic are not party to the Convention. In the case of Mexico, this attitude is rated by specialists as “wise and rebellious”. We must also recall that the following Caribbean States remain outside the ICSID jurisdiction: Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Dominica (Commonwealth of) and Suriname. In South America, Brazil has not ratified (or even signed) the ICSID convention and the 6^th most powerful world economy seems to show no special interest in doing so.
  
  In the case of Costa Rica, access to ICSID system is extremely interesting: Costa Rica signed the ICSID Convention in September, 1981 but didn’t ratify it until 12 years later, in 1993. We read in a memorandum of GCAB (Global Committee of Argentina Bondholders) that Costa Rica`s decision resulted from direct United States pressure due to the Santa Elena expropriation case, which was decided in 2000 :
  "In the 1990s, following the expropriation of property owned allegedly by an American investor, Costa Rica refused to submit the dispute to ICSID arbitration. The American investor invoked the Helms Amendment and delayed a $ 175 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to Costa Rica. Costa Rica consented to the ICSID proceedings, and the American investor ultimately recovered U.S. $ 16 million”.
  
  https://icsid.worldbank.org/apps/ICSIDWEB/Pages/default.aspx ... Disobeying foreign courts !

• Argentina, Ecuador and Iceland : 3 different ways to treat debt : spécificities and limits

• Vive la banqueroute - François Ruffin présente son nouveau livre

• Closing meeting : Dig in our resistance, branch out our struggles!