As part of the World Social Forum the International People's Tribunal on Debt convened between February 1 and 2 in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande del Sul, Brazil. Jubilee South, the Jubilee South Brazil Campaign joined with the American Association of Jurists, the Committee for Third World Debt Cancellation, the Ecological Debt Creditor's Alliance, Ustawi and the World March of women, among many others, joined together to organize this international tribunal.

Social movements, churches, unions, professional organizations, NGOs, political parties and renown personalities are brought together in the Jubilee South network extending to 45 countries of the South and enjoying the support of diverse entities in the North. The International People’s Tribunal convened in order to determine and rule upon the responsibility of Banks and Transnational Corporations, Governments in the North, the IMF, the World Bank and other international financial institutions for the crime of illegitimately indebting the countries and peoples of the South. This has generated a high cost in human lives, the destruction of our productive capacity, the quality of life of our peoples, with increases in poverty, infant mortality, social exclusion and grave economic and environmental damages. This Tribunal in addition to ruling on evidence as regards the illegitimacy of the debt, identifying the principal responsible culprits and their respective roles, also assumed the task of proposing alternative paths to secure debt repudiation and cancellation.

Ours is an opinion Tribunal, not a legislative court. Nonetheless, it upholds the principles of rigorous argumentation and documentation based upon the diversity of judicial and ethical traditions. Based upon broad documentary evidence and testimonies presented by men and women from Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Pacific expressed over the course of three sessions, the Popular Jury, integrated by social representatives of societies of different countries, have come to the following VERDICT:

1. THAT according to studies and dates the debt of the poorest countries has been paid several times over so that, in addition to resulting unpayable, 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 South to North. In 1998, the 41 poorest and most indebted countries transferred some 1,680 billion USD more than they received. In that same year, Third World Countries contributed some 114.600 billion dollars to the private and public coffers of the North.
4. THAT, since 1981, the people of the South have transferred to the North 3.700 billion dollars, an amount that is six times what was owed that year (560 billion) and that today more that 200 billion is still owed.
5. THAT neoliberal polices lead to an explosive growth in the external debt affecting the capacity to carry out social policies and compromising seriously 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 interests rates over their historical level from 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 the debtor countries to take out more debt in order to pay interests rates, occasioning additional payments that in the case of Latin America represented a loss of 106 billion dollars.
7. THAT there is a link between external debt and excessive public internal debt and the search for 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 large parts of the budgets dedicated to social benefit. In the process they sacrificed the possibility of stimulating their internal economies in order to keep up payments abandoning thereby health, education, employment, popular housing, land demarcation for indigenous peoples and their conditions of survivals of people. Also sacrificed was the opportunity to value the elderly and 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 were forced to increase their debt even more as well as external obligations, forcing a moratorium in the payment of social and environmental debts that were owed to children, indigenous peoples, women and men rural and urban laborers, black men and women, and nature.
10. THAT the indebtment of these countries was carried out by dictatorial governments, also illegitimate and antipopular, and that creditors were accomplices but also were quite aware of the risks that these loans entailed.
11. THAT the growth of the debt is also linked to the elites in countries in the South, that now as throughout history, have indulge external financial institutions, private and official 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 intelectual appropriation of their ancestral knowledge, for the use and degradation of its best land, water and land for export projects that threaten the food sovereignty of the people, the product of toxic waste that threatens the survival of peoples.
13. THAT the external debt constitutes a permanent violation of human, economic, social and cultural rights established by the United Nations on December 16, 1988. Here the UN demands the recognition of the right of national self-determination, to economic development as well as to freely dispose its wealth and natural resources, and that in no case can a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.

1. The External Debt of the countries of the South, having been materialized outside of national and international legal frameworks, without consulting the society, having favored elites almost exclusively to detriment of a majority of the people, and having wounded national sovereignty, is illegitimate, unjust and unsustainably ethically, juridical and politically.
2. The accused, Banks and transnational corporations, governments of the North, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other financial institutions and its collaborators in the South are South, coauthors, accomplices and collaborators of the following crimes:
   1. Draining 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 the unequal exchange regime that also contributed to the increase in the external debt, adding to the extraction and production of a raw materials to be sold at very low prices yet at once importing 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 sharply increase instead of diminishing notwithstanding the regular flow of repayments from the South
   4. Carrying out fraudulent operations between international banks and businesses in the South, inventing inexistent debt, or through exploitative mechanisms that instead of favoring production allowed the enrichment of a few because these simulated debts were later made state debts.
   5. Applying structural adjustment and other economic policies that obligate 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 though loans that sustained and illicitly enriched the dictators, this notwithstanding the rejection of oppressed peoples and sanctions imposed by the United Nations and human rights organizations.
   7. Channeling in perverse form the resources from contracted debt towards the enrichment of officials, for outlandish expenditures and depositing in foreign banks instead of using these toward social benefits
   8. Imposing economic integration programs that only favor the interests of transnational companies and the industrial countries of the North, all in based 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, the right of people to 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 the External Debt be declared as fraudulent, illegitimate and the cause of 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 the citizens present in this forum and to the people of the Third World as well as citizens of countries in the North who stand in solidarity with the peoples' cause, and jointly realize a campaign external debt cancellation
• Initiate processes of the sovereign and independent audits of the external debts of our countries in order to verify actual existing legal and, if indeed there is still a debt that should be repaid, establish participative and democratic procedures for social control over indebtedness.
• Urge Parliaments of indebted countries to investigate the use of the debt by those responsible of generating it in order to take them before the justice system, if so warranted.
• Develop Dignity and Sovereignty Campaigns that will block bilateral and multilateral economic agreements contrary to peoples interests, and against agreements with the IMF or International Financial Institutions
• Propose to governments that the unite around this common cause and do whatever is necessary so as to insure the International Court of Justice in the Hague renders a Consultative Opinion as regards the illegitimacy of the external debt and about the suspension of all interest payments on the debt
• Propose tog governments that these interests payments instead be used exclusively for sustainable development projects for the lives of all of our citizens.
• Accompany local and national processes that seed to create sustainable societies as seen from an economic, food, energy and environmental perspective
• Support the campaign for the payment of the Ecological Debt, an obligation and responsibility of the countries of the South, transnational corporations, multilateral banks and other private financial institutions for carrying out environmental destruction in the South
• To deliver this Tribunal's conclusions to the identified principal accused parties and ask that they respond in a given amount of time
• Accompany the legal processes that will follow this verdict on the part of the identified accused parties, declared guilty by this Tribunal, so as to avoid that the crimes committed remain in impunity, denouncing also the corrupt governments that have allowed the pillaging of their peoples.

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.

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