Debt Beyond Contract
Supplément
no 2
Edouard Dommen (ed.), May
2001
The cancellation of third world debt is a cause
which mobilises a large number of people. In response to the pressures
of indebted countries and civil society,
the international financial institutions claim that contracts must be
respected and insist on the discipline which that entails. What are the
limits to their arguments? How is one to respond to them? Can better ones
be brought to bear against them? Even accepting their claims, can the
fairness be improved along with the efficiency of the mechanisms which
determine the conditions of repayment?
The Observatoire de la finance has invited lawyers, economists, financiers, senior international officials, an ethicist, an accountant and a specialist in international commercial arbitration to examine these questions. The authors come from varied professional backgrounds; they therefore express themselves in a variety of styles which add to the spice of this anthology.
This work is intended to be impartial and intellectually rigorous. It presents a set of objective arguments explaining the conditions under which it is permissible, according to the standards of the different professions involved in finance, for a debtor to refuse to repay his debt as originally contracted or for a creditor to forgive it. Thus equipped, those who are campaigning to lighten the debt burden will be better acquainted with the arguments on which they can rely, or conversely with those to which they need to find a convincing answer.
Contents
Introduction by Edouard Dommen
1. Under what conditions is it legitimate
to demand the repayment of a money debt?
Contributions by Edouard Dommen, James Gordley, A. W. Travis, Hans Blommestein,
Dale Hildebrand and Bertrand Legendre.
2. Through what mechanisms is it legitimate
to demand the repayment of a money debt?
Contributions by Jean-Loup Dherse, Kunibert Ragger, Alice de Jonge, Bertrand
Legendre, Yilmaz Akyüz and Andrew Cornford.
