ANND stands in solidarity and supports global efforts exerted towards cancelling unsustainable debt levels
ANND stands in solidarity and supports global efforts exerted towards canceling unsustainable debt levels in light of deteriorating socio-economic and environmental conditions in Lebanon, regionally and globally.
Countries in the MENA and the global South are subject to increasing levels of debts and inequality, furthermore, the IMF conditionalities and their corollary of austerity measures lead to extremely high social costs that only worsen living conditions. The IMF approach to social protection relies on poverty-targeting social assistance programmes and cuts on social expenditures relevant to universal social protection (even in their most regressive form, namely subsidies that remained until very recently the only form of universal social protection in the country).
In that regard, ANND signed the Global Week of Action for Justice and Global Debt Cancellation petition evolving around the below seven demands:
1. Immediate debt cancellation by all lenders including IFIs, governments and private lenders, to enable people to deal with multi-dimensional crises.
2. Systemic changes in financial and economic systems to stop the accumulation of unsustainable and illegitimate debt, to offer fair and comprehensive solutions to debt crises, and to build more equitable, just and post-carbon societies.
3. The immediate delivery of new, additional and non-debt creating climate finance for adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage.
4. Thorough-going national and global review and changes in lending, borrowing and payment policies and practices aimed at preventing the re-accumulation of unsustainable and illegitimate debt, strengthening democratic institutions and processes, upholding human rights and peoples' self-determination.
5. Genuine participatory, inclusive debt transparency and accountability mechanisms and processes, including national debt and audits.
6. The establishment of a fair, transparent, binding and multilateral framework for debt crisis resolution.
7. Reparations for the damages caused to countries, peoples and nature, due to the contracting, use and payment of unsustainable and illegitimate debts and the conditions imposed to guarantee their collection.
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