Paris Club gets red card on 50th birthday

Debt campaigners from around the world, including Jubilee Debt Campaign, have marked the 50th birthday of the Paris Club by staging an Unfair World Cup outside its headquarters.

The protest, in the Place du Bataillon du Pacifique in Paris, was against 50 years of unjust and untransparent decisions about poor country debt by the Paris Club, a group of 19 rich creditor nations that meets behind closed doors with no formal rules.

A team of 19 players, each sporting a t-shirt with the name of one of the Paris Club member countries - including France, the US and the UK - took on a team of one player, Kenya, representing the debtor countries that periodically visit the Paris Club to ask for debt cancellation. There was no referee.

The Paris Club has consistently failed to provide long term solutions to countries in debt crisis, as is clear from the repeated negotiations many countries have had to go through: Senegal has visited the Paris Club 14 times since 1980; Democratic Republic of Congo 11 times, Cote d’Ivoire nine times, and Gabon eight times.

A statement signed by 41 non-governmental organisations working on debt said: “The Paris Club is a cartel of official creditors whose role is to maximize overall returns on their loans. By privileging creditors’ interests it has done little to guarantee a fair and transparent setting or sustainable outcomes for debt crisis resolution.”

The statement concluded: “As it is today, the Paris Club does not have any legitimacy. Civil society organizations from the South and the North demand a radical change to the way international debt is managed.”