External debt and structural adjustment programmes: instruments of domination

HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Workshop on promoting and protecting economic, social and cultural rights within the context of addressing inequalities in the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic
(6-8 février 2023)

Foreign debt and structural adjustment programmes are used by the world’s powerful as instruments of domination to impose : the unfair rules of international trade, the instrumentalisation of intellectual property rights on medicines and vaccines for example, the privatisation of public services (such as health, education, housing, transport etc), the removal of all control over prices, the removal of subsidies to family farmers, the adjustment of laws and taxation in favour of transnational corporations and the powerful, the flexibilisation of the labour market to the extreme (“zero-hour” contracts and the uberisation of the economy).

Read the CETIM’s oral declaration in French