Who are the CADTM ? What is Illegitimate debt ? An ABC

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28 October 2025 by Eric Toussaint , Maxime Perriot

Founded in 1990, the Committee for the Abo- lition of Illegitimate Debt (Comité pour l’Abolition des dettes illégitimes, previously called Comité pour l’Annulation de la Dette du Tiers-Monde [Committee for the Cancellation of Third-World Debt], the source of its acronym) works tirelessly to highlight how debt is linked to the inability of the global capitalist and patriarchal economic system to protect the basic rights of millions of people worldwide.

CADTM International is a network comprising approximately thirty organizations active in more than thirty countries across four continents: Africa, Asia, Latin America and Caribbean, and Europe. Its primary focus, centred on the issue of debt, involves undertaking actions and developing popular radical alternatives aimed at fostering the emergence of a world rooted in sovereignty, solidarity, and cooperation among peoples, as well as respect for nature and for life, equality, social justice and peace.

During the 1990s, the CADTM highlighted the necessity of establishing just and equitable relations between the countries of the North and South, beginning with the cancellation of debt. It specifically emphasized the detrimental impact of the debt mechanisms employed by multilateral financial entities, such as the governments of the North through the Paris Club Paris Club This group of lender States was founded in 1956 and specializes in dealing with non-payment by developing countries.

and major private international financial groups, on the development of Southern countries. Today, in addition, the involvement of new creditors such as China must be taken into consideration.

Whereas the priority of the CADTM, as its original name indicates, was the cancellation of debt in the countries once referred to as the Third World, its broader goal is to elucidate, through its analyses and activism, how the “Debt System” is harmful not only for the people of the countries of the Global South, but also for the populations of the most industrialized countries.

As stated in the Political Charter of the CADTM International:

“In both the North and the South, debt is one of the devices used to transfer the wealth created by workers and small producers to the capita- lists. Public debt is used by the creditors as an instrument of political and economic domina- tion that establishes a new form of colonization, with the local ruling classes taking their com- mission in the process. Abusive private debts claimed from the popular classes are a tool of dispossession and oppression.”

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Author

Eric Toussaint

is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.
He is the author of World Bank: A Critical History, London, Pluto, 2023, Greece 2015: there was an alternative. London: Resistance Books / IIRE / CADTM, 2020 , Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012, etc.
See his bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Toussaint
He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.

Author

Maxime Perriot

CADTM Belgique

Translation(s)

Other publications in English :

The World Bank A Critical History
3 July 2023 - Eric Toussaint
Africa : the debt trap and how to get out of it
27 March 2023 - CADTM
Greece 2015: There was an alternative
6 October 2020 - Eric Toussaint
Impact of European policies on the Global South and possible alternatives
8 September 2020 - ReCommons Europe
Package of common demands on debt and the need for citizens’ control on finance at European level - Executive summary
3 August 2020 - CADTM, Collective

Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt