Responding to the challenges of our Southern partners means understanding debt in a different framework and designing new international processes that relate to that framework. International arbitration process needed The South Africa Jubilee campaign has forcefully made the case for declaring South Africa's apartheid-era debt odious and writing it off. Some kind of international court or tribunal empowered to judge odious and other illegitimate debts and order their cancellation is needed. April 1999 DEBT is the most visible negative sign of the crisis of the neo-liberal paradigm. The most recent Asian crisis increased the debt as private sector debt was passed on to governments as a condition for bailouts of bankrupt economies.
Debt servicing draws away needed funds for basic social services especially health and education.
For peoples of the Third World, the only imperative is to break away from the debt cycle and work for genuine social and economic reforms. While we focus on the building of a sustained campaign to break the debt cycle, we are at the same time committed to working for immediate debt relief. Our position is to broaden the Jubilee Debt Debate to encompass breaking free from the cycle of debt and the bondage of years of underdevelopment and indebtedness. In Brazil, the Jubilee 2000 campaign have taken their own initiative around this. On 26-28 April, a Peoples' Tribunal was convened to judge the legitimacy of Brazil's foreign debt.