VERDICT

Convened by the international network of Jubilee South, together with the Jubilee South Brazil Campaign, the American Association of Jurists, the Committee for the Cancellation of Third World Debt, Kairos-Canada, Jubilee USA Network, the Southern Peoples' Ecological Debt Creditors' Alliance, Ustawi, and the Worldwide Women's March, among many others, the International Peoples' Tribunal on Debt  was held between February 1 and 2 in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, as part of the World Social Forum II.

The Tribunal was promoted by the social movements, churches, unions, professional organizations, Ngos, feminist organizations, political parties and renowned personalities that constitute Jubilee South in 45 countries of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean, together with the support of diverse entities in the North.  It was convened in order to determine and rule upon the responsibility of banks and transnational corporations, governments in the North, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other international financial institutions, for the crime of illegitimately indebting the countries and peoples of the South.  A crime that has  generated a high cost in human lives, the destruction of our productive capacity and of the quality of life of our peoples, with increases in poverty, infant mortality, social exclusion and grave economic and environmental damages.  In addition to ruling on evidence as regards the illegitimacy of the debt and identifying the principal culprits and their respective roles, the International Peoples' Tribunal also assumed the task of proposing alternatives in order to secure debt repudiation and annulment.

This Tribunal is a court of opinion rather than a court of justice.  Nonetheless, it upholds the principles of rigorous argumentation and documentation supported by a diversity of judicial and ethical traditions.  On the basis of an accusation complemented by a broad range of documentary evidence and testimonies presented by men and women illustrative of peoples throughout the South, expressed over the course of three sessions, the Popular Jury, integrated by persons representative of the societies of different countries, has come to the following verdict:

Considering

1.  THAT according to studies and data the debt of the countries of the South has been paid several times over so that, in addition to being unpayable, it is also illegitimate, unjust and immoral.

2.  THAT the external debt, in addition to constituting an economic problem, is also an ethical, political, social, historical, and environmental problem, generating responsibilities at various levels and demanding immediate action.

3.  THAT external debt payments entail a net transfer of resources from the South to the North.  In 1998, the 41 poorest and most indebted countries transferred some US$1.68 billion more than they received.  In that same year, the countries of the Third World contributed some US$114.6 billion to the private and public coffers of the most industrialized countries of the North.

4.  THAT, between 1981 and 2000,  the people of the South have transferred to the North US$3.7 trillion, an amount equivalent to six times what was owed that year (US$560 billion) even though today more than US$2 trillion is still owed.

5.  THAT  neoliberal polices lead to an exponential growth in external debt, impeding the carrying out of social policies and seriously compromising the political sovereignty of the countries of the South.

6.  THAT the unilateral decision of the United States, at the end of the 1970s, to increase interest rates from their historical level of 4-6 percent to more than 20 percent over a period of a few months, spelled a betrayal of good faith assumed in the original contracts. In addition to forcing  debtor countries to take out more debt in order to make interest payments, this decision occasioned additional payments that in the case of Latin America represented a loss of US$106 billion dollars.

7.  THAT there is a link between external debt, excessive public domestic debt, and the dependence on short term external capital, all provoking very high interest rates in the South.

8.  THAT governments in the South, conceiving the financial system as an end in itself, sacrificed the parts of their budgets dedicated to social benefits and the stimulus of the domestic economy in order to keep up payments on their financial debts, thereby abandoning healthcare, education, employment creation, popular housing, the demarcation and guaranteeing of land for indigenous peoples together with the conditions necessary for their survival as peoples.  Also sacrificed was the opportunity to uphold the dignity of the elderly and of children, to carry out agrarian reform, to conserve and recover the environment.

9.  THAT the IMF's adjustment and other economic policies proved disastrous for the countries subjected to them, serving to increase their debt even more as well as other external obligations, forcing a moratorium in the repayment of social and environmental debts that are owed to children, indigenous peoples, both male and female rural and urban laborers, black men and women, and nature.

10. THAT the indebtment of these countries was carried out by dictatorial governments, by their very nature illegitimate and antipopular, and that the creditors not only were accomplices but were also quite aware of the risks that these loans entailed.

11. THAT the growth of the debt is also linked to the elites in countries of the South, that now, as throughout history, have been complacent with external financial institutions, both private and public as well as with the multilateral ones.

12. THAT the countries of the North have an ecological debt with the South on account of the historical pillaging of its resources, the intellectual appropriation of their ancestral knowledge, for the use and degradation of its best land, water and air for export projects that affect food sovereignty,  increase the  production of toxic wastes,  and threaten the survival of peoples. 

13. THAT the external debt constitutes a permanent violation of economic, social, and cultural human rights established by the United Nations in 1966, rights which demand the recognition of the right of all peoples to their own self-determination, to economic development as well as to dispose freely of their wealth and natural resources, and that in no case can a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.

The members of the jury of the International People's Tribunal on Debt unanimously decide:

1.  The External Debt of the countries of the South, for having been accumulated outside of national and international legal frameworks and without consultation with society, for having favored elites almost exclusively to the detriment of the majority of the people, and for having hurt national sovereignty, is illegitimate, unjust and ethically, legally, and politically unsustainable.

2.  The accused  banks and transnational corporations, governments of the North, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international financial institutions and their collaborators in the South, are authors, coauthors, accomplices, and concealers of the following crimes: 

1. Draining in a parasitic manner the natural patrimony and other resources of the South in order to meet external debt payments, abetting this political, ecological, and economic instrument of exploitation of our peoples.
2. Upholding and favoring unequal terms of trade that also contributed to the increase in the external debt, adding to the extraction and production of raw materials sold at very low prices and the importing of industrial products bought at highly elevated prices, as rich countries' subsidies further reinforced the unequal exchange regime.
3. Charging usurious interest rates that made the external debt increase exponentially, rather than diminish, notwithstanding the regular flow of repayments from the South. 
4. Carrying out fraudulent operations between large transnational banks and business people in the South, inventing nonexistent debts  through the use of speculative mechanisms that instead of favoring production, allowed the enrichment of a few as these simulated debts were later made public debts.
5. Applying structural adjustment  and other economic policies that oblige our states to undertake privatization processes affecting the ownership of natural resources and public utilities, and paying the debt with the money that should have been invested in social works and for economic reactivation.  
6. Supporting dictatorial or criminal regimes through loans that sustained and illicitly enriched the dictators, notwithstanding their rejection by oppressed peoples and sanctions imposed by the United Nations and human rights organizations. 
7. Channeling in perverse form the resources accrued through the contracting of debts, towards the enrichment of government officials, sumptuous expenditures, and their deposit in foreign banks,  instead of using them toward social benefits.
8. Imposing economic integration programs that only favor the interests of transnational companies and the industrial countries of the North, in violation of the fundamental individual and collective human rights of peoples.
9. Imposing political and economic conditions of recession in debtor countries  in order to secure debt renegotiations. 
10. Continuing to collect a debt that has already been paid several fold to the point of making the people the victims of fraud.  
11. Breaking international law, its norms and legal instruments, such as 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,  the right of peoples to their self-determination, among many others, as well as national legislation. 
12. Plotting among the accused to loot and exploit Third World peoples as the result of the aforementioned crimes committed systematically.
13. Committing crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity. 

The Jury thereby requests the Tribunal to dictate a sentence condemning those accused for the commissioning of all or some of the crimes committed and indicated in this verdict.  It also requests that the External Debt be declared nonexistent, and thereby extinct, for being odious, infamous, illegal, usurious, unjust, fraudulent, and illegitimate, and for provoking the loss of national sovereignty and the quality of life of the majority of the population of the South.

Finally the Jury exhorts the Tribunal to accept the following recommendations:

• To call for unity among citizens present in this forum, all the peoples of the South, as well as citizens of countries in the North who stand in solidarity with the  peoples' cause, in order to campaign together to achieve the repudiation and cancellation of the external debt.
• Initiate sovereign processes of independent audits of the external debts of our countries, in order to verify actual existing legal debt  if indeed there is still a debt that should be repaid, and establish participative and democratic procedures for social control over indebtedness.
• Urge Parliaments of indebted countries to investigate the handling of the debt by those responsible for generating it, in order to hold them legally accountable as warranted.
• Demand the restitution of the riches extracted from the South, as well as the payment of reparations for the damages wrought.
• Demand the return to our peoples of the wealth illegitimately accumulated by the dictatorships, corrupt governments, and transnational corporations that have been accomplices.
• Develop Dignity and Sovereignty Campaigns  that will block bilateral and multilateral economic agreements contrary to peoples' interests, including  agreements with the IMF or other international financial institutions.
• Propose to governments that they unite around this common cause  and do whatever is necessary, to solicit from the International Court of Justice in the Hague a Consultative Opinion as regards the illegitimacy of the external debt and to suspend all payments on the debt.
• Propose to governments that these resources instead be used exclusively for programs of sustainable development for the life of all of our peoples.
• Pursue local and national processes that seek to create sustainable societies as seen from an economic, food, energy, environmental, equality, and equitability perspective.
• Support the campaign to demand  payment of the Ecological Debt, an obligation and responsibility of the states of the North, transnational corporations, multilateral banks and other private financial institutions for carrying out  environmental destruction in the South.
• Deliver the conclusions of this Tribunal to the principal accused parties thus far identified, and ask that they respond in a given amount of time.
• Pursue the legal claims which, following on this verdict, co-plaintiffs may pursue against those accused parties, fully identified and declared guilty by this Tribunal, so as to avoid that the crimes committed remain in impunity.   Denounce also the corrupt governments that have allowed the pillaging of their peoples.
• Constitute a global commission on debt with a mandate to investigate and identify all those who are responsible for perpetrating illegitimate debt and to support initiatives to bring them to justice.
• Notify the United Nations and other regional and international bodies, demanding consideration of the elaboration of instruments to insure that full compliance with universal human rights takes priority over any debt-service claims.

The Jury submits the present Verdict to the Tribunal seeking justice for the peoples of the South and for all of humanity.   This is the symbolic road of a long march.  This is our decision. Publish and disseminate.

Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, February 2, 2002

Members of the Jury:

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (Nobel Peace Laureate, ARGENTINA),
Dennis Brutus (Poet, SOUTH AFRICA),
Pedro Ross (Workers' Central, CUBA), 
Yvonne Yanez (Southern Peoples' Alliance of Ecological Debt Creditors, ECUADOR),
Rosemary Nyerere (Member of Parliament, TANZANIA),
Marie Frantz Joachim (Worldwide Women's March, HAITI),
Samba Tembile (International Youth Camp, MALI),
Rogate Mshana (World Council of Churches, TANZANIA),
Sekou Diarra (Jubilee 2000, MALI),
Shelly Emalyn Rao (Economic and Social Research Council, FIJI).