[stop-imf] The verdict from International Peoples' Tribunal on Debt

[Robert Weissman]

From: <becky@lozada.net>

Dear friends,

The fourth and concluding session of the International Peoples' Tribunal
on Debt was held yesterday, April 18, at 10 AM-12 noon at the First
Congregational Church, 945 G Street NW, Washington DC, USA.

Below and attached is a copy of the judgement handed down by members of
the Presidium officiating yesterday -- Judge Dumisa Ntsebeza, former
chief investigator of the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission; Dr. CP Chandrasekhar, chairperson of the Center for Economic
Studies and Planing in India, Sra. Nora Cortinas of the Madres de Plaza
de Mayo Argentina; and Dr Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian physician and writer.

The Tribunal reviewed the accusation, bill of indicment, and testimonies
presented in the first three sessions held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. A
reiteration of the final plea was made by Beverly Keene for the prosecution.

Jury members present -- Nobel Peace Laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel and
Ms Shelly Emalin Rao -- reiterated the guilty verdict handed down by the
10-member jury in Porto Alegre on February 2, 2002.

The fourth session was called by the Presidium to give the International
Monetary Fund, World Bank, creditor and debtor governments and others
accused for their culpability in the accumulation and maintenance of the
debt of the South the time to present their defense.


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.