By: Mary Donahue
Celebration is in order after a huge victory for the principles of responsible lending and borrowing was won in Doha, Qatar at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meetings held in the end of April. This round of UNCTAD meetings was crucial to the future vision and responsibilities of UNCTAD - and subsequently debt relief - as financial ministers and representatives from the around the world met to discuss the conference’s mandate, and thus set the course for its future work. UNCTAD has long been a leading forum for consensus building on debt relief initiatives, like HIPC and MDRI that have led to hundreds of billions of dollars in debt relief. But leading into the meetings, it was leaked that there were secret talks of eliminating debt and financial reform from the mandate, and it was clear that the battle to keep debt relief and principles of responsible lending and borrowing a priority would be hard fought.
Jubilee USA has been acting as an expert to UNCTAD since the body launched the Project to Promote Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing in 2009. The Project seeks to develop internationally recognized principles to promote and reinforce responsible lending and borrowing and is a prime example of the truly global consensus work that UNCTAD has come to be known for. These principles, which Jubilee USA promotes both here in the US and internationally and which we released in our latest report the Responsible Lending and Borrowing Imperative, would help establish real solutions to the international debt crisis and would come from both the Global North and Global South. Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of Jubilee USA, was hosted by UNCTAD to attend the Doha meetings as a civil society representative and to moderate a panel featuring 11 financial ministers and treasury heads from around the globe to speak in support of UNCTAD’s principles of responsible lending and borrowing.
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