Alternatives to negotiate sovereign debt –Any movement towards Fair and Transparent Arbitration mechanism

Although not all heavily indebted poor countries, the HIPCs, have benefited from the HIPC (1999) debt relief initiative and the subsequent Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI 2005) we have been left with many lessons of enduring these processes. The lessons include the fundamental fact that these relief initiatives are not sustainable. The following might be some of the reasons for that. Firstly they are creditor led with decisions about who could and could not get debt relief being made by creditors on premises that sometimes arearbitrary. The debtor countries are in a minor position in the whole process. Secondly the initiatives were a result of pressure from civil society and were not structural and based on fair and just global financial architecture.Thirdly they were based on some philanthropic attitude which would seem to condone the value system of a brutal capitalism . It is our hope that today’s debt relief can be based more on a common value system based on position of justice, equity and human rights.