(March 29, 2007) A petition signed by international luminaries such as Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu, the renowned American academic Noam Chomsky and former French Ambassador Stephane Hessel, among others, is calling on the Group of Eight (G8) creditor nations to place the issue of odious and illegitimate debt on the political agenda at this year’s G8 summit.

(March 24, 2007) The British government has announced it is dedicating a police unit to investigate cases of alleged bribes involving foreign bribery by U.K. businesses and nationals, including allegations that a number of U.K.-based companies paid bribes to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq as part of the United Nations’ discredited oil-for-food program.

(March 23, 2007) The Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is the largest multilateral effort aimed at providing debt relief. In this essay, we address the question of whether this program is consistent with a view of justice commonly known as liberal egalitarianism. We argue that the HIPC initiative violates two basic liberal egalitarian principles.

(March 23, 2007) Since the late 1970s, an increasingly global coalition of churches and nongovernmental organizations has pressed for reduction if not outright cancellation of the foreign debt of highly indebted poor countries, because of its deleterious impact on poor people.

(March 23, 2007) The Argentine debt crisis of 2001–2002 and its aftermath are examined in the light of the moral framework of Catholic social teaching on the debt problems of poor countries.

(March 23, 2007) Present arrangements governing the accumulation and discharge of debt by states are difficult to justify fully on the basis of underlying normative considerations. States are different from individuals in important respects, and the deontological justifications that explain why individuals have a strong burden to abide by promises to repay do not straightforwardly apply to countries.

(March 19, 2007) This essay characterizes the main actors and how they operate during a buildup of government foreign debt and after a default on payments. These actors are the borrowing governments, domestic and foreign commercial banks, purchasers of government bonds, other governments lending to the debtor, and multilateral institutions (the International Monetary Fund and development banks).

(March 19, 2007) Risk and liability change the initially stipulated terms of contracts, overruling their otherwise binding nature. Risk encourages careful assessment of debtors’ abilities to service debts. Errors and negligence in assessment, and even external shocks, make creditors suffer losses.

(March 16, 2007) This Article proposes that sovereign nations and their creditors adopt a contractual approach to the seemingly intractable problem of odious debt.