Judgment of the International People's Tribunal on Debt

Having heard the case for the prosecution, the evidence presented by the  witnesses and the verdict of the jury, and taking into account the silence of  the accused who were invited to defend themselves, we the judges elected to  this International People's Tribunal on Debt, declare that the following  accused have been found guilty of the crimes detailed below:

1. Governments of the North which over the years have

(a) used non-economic political and military means to appropriate and transfer  to the North, the economic and ecological wealth of the countries of the South,  creating in the process the economic, social and political structures that lead  to dependence of the South on capital inflows in general and external debt  flows in particular, that have become new and less-transparent forms of further  appropriation and transfer of wealth;

(b) used their economic and military might to support processes that create and  perpetuate agencies like the giant international banks, financial institutions  and industrial and trading corporations, which in the name of pursuit of  profit, have served as agents of transfer of wealth from the South into the  hands of the dominant economic interests in the North and ensured the process  of debt dependence;

(c) created multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, and more  recently the WTO, which coordinate and oversee the process of capital transfer,  ensure that debt dependence is used as an instrument to put in place neoliberal  policies that perpetuate such dependence, and force developing country  governments to provide an implicit sovereign guarantee on all accumulated  external debt, public and private;

(d) used coercion to force governments in the South to adopt policies that  facilitate the process of illegitimate transfer of wealth.

2. The international banks, financial institutions, industrial corporations and  trading houses that are the immediate beneficiaries of the transfer of wealth  that debt sustains and served as mechanisms to ensure such transfer in favor  of themselves and their collaborators.

3. The multilateral institutions that have served as agencies to foster and  sustain debt dependence, coordinate debt and other capital flows and create  conditions in the South that facilitate at all cost wealth transfer from the  South to the North.

4. Corrupt and dominant social and economic interests and the governments they  control in the South that have in their own self-interest collaborated to  different degrees with the above accused and used State power in the South to  legitimize, facilitate and enforce the above-mentioned mechanisms of wealth  transfer mediated through debt.

The verdict of the jury is:

(i) that all the accumulated debt of the South to  the North is illegitimate and has in fact been paid back many times over;

(ii)  that debt dependence, created by the above accused through the means described,  leads to economic and political conditions that result in social deprivation  that amounts to a creeping process of economic and social genocide; and that 

(iii) besides being reprehensible on moral and humanitarian grounds, is a  violation of existing international law as embodied, inter alia, in the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Covenant 169 of the International Labor  Organization on indigenous peoples, the Convention on the Elimination of all  Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the universally recognized right of  peoples to self-determination.

Given the above the International People's Tribunal on Debt makes the following  declarations:

1. All external debt being illegitimate should be immediately repudiated and  cancelled.

2. In return for the wealth illegitimately transferred to the North from the  South, the countries of the South should be provided reasonable compensation,  to determine the magnitude and manner of payment of which a Global Commission on Debt should be constituted.

3. Since unnatural power is related to unwarranted size and reach, the banks,  financial institutions, industrial corporations, landed interests and other  economic agents who control assets which give them such power should be broken  down and their power curtailed, so that the recurrence of the process of growth of illegitimate debt is foreclosed.

4. International institutions which serve as agents to coordinate, oversee and  guarantee debt flows, such as the IMF and the World Bank, should be  decommissioned and any residual useful role served by them should be handed  over to more democratically-managed international institutions.

5. Neoliberal policy regimes that are designed to sustain and worsen debt and  obfuscate the resulting process of economic aggrandizement at one pole and  social deprivation at the other should be dismantled, to be replaced by more  pro-people and pro-poor policies of development.

6. Besides social mobilization to pressurize governments in the North and the  South to implement these recommendations, the Tribunal calls on people to use  supplementary legal procedures such as petitions in the International Court of  Justice at The Hague to bring individual instances of violation of individual  social and human rights to trial and force governments to implement these  recommendations. 

- Fourth and Concluding Session of the Tribunal, 18 April 2002, First Congregational Church, 945 G Street NW, Washington DC, USA