From the article:
On Friday August 25, the US government imposed financial sanctions on Venezuela, restricting the ability of President Nicolás Maduro’s government and its oil company, PDVSA, to issue new debt in American capital markets. The sanctions were imposed in response to the regime’s unconstitutional and fraudulent election of a constituent assembly and the de facto closure of the constitutionally elected National Assembly, with its two-thirds opposition majority...
According to this doctrine, debt incurred by “odious” regimes should not be enforceable, because the lender should have known that the debt was incurred without the consent of the people or for their benefit. As Sack put it: “This debt does not bind the nation; it is a debt of the regime, a personal debt contracted by the ruler, and consequently it falls with the demise of the regime.”
The odious debt idea was revived in an influential 2006 article by Seema Jayachandran and Michael Kremer, and in a 2010 report by the Center for Global Development (CGD), which proposed that economic sanctions include a mechanism aimed at preventing the accumulation of odious obligations. The mechanism would take the form of a declaration that debt issued by a particular government would be considered odious. In effect, this is what the Trump administration has just done.
Such a declaration reduces the flow of funds to odious regimes, owing to the risk that successor governments will renounce their predecessor’s debts without incurring legal and reputational costs (because participating countries’ courts will not enforce the debt contracts).
The CGD report proposes that a regime should be considered odious if it abuses the human rights of the population, employs military coercion, perpetrates electoral fraud, and mismanages or misappropriates public funds.
Read full article here.
