A Country Is Entitled to Refuse to Repay a Debt
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- Published on Friday, 11 December 2020 03:30
- Written by editor
A Country Is Entitled to Refuse to Repay a Debt
The following interview, given by Éric Toussaint to the Argentine review Mugica, has been adapted to make it accessible to readers who are not necessarily aware of the details of what is going on in Argentina.
The arguments used in the article are supported by the realities of the situation in Argentina. They can be applied to many countries around the world as they are based on a series of concrete experiences, jurisprudence and concepts linked to international law.
Mugica Review (MR): In 1927 Alexander Sack claimed that for a debt to be defined as odious, the nature of the political regime is irrelevant. In other words, it is irrelevant whether it is a dictatorship or a democracy, since the decisive... factor is whether that debt was contracted against the interests of the people. Do you agree with that claim? Isn’t the concept of “respecting the interests of the people” rather ambiguous?
Éric Toussaint (ÉT): The doctrine elaborated in the 20th century by Alexander Sack on the basis of two centuries of jurisprudence from litigation over sovereign debt makes it perfectly clear that the nature of the government is not a criterion for determining the odious character of a debt. Regarding the question of “against the People,” there are three terms in the doctrine that make reference to this contradiction, namely debt contracted against the interests of the Nation, contracted against the People and/or against the interests of the State.
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