What are odious debts?
Excerpt from The Doctrine of Odious Debts, Chapter 17 of the book Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption, and the Third World’s Environmental Legacy by Patricia Adams The legal doctrine of odious debts was given shape by Alexander Nahum Sack a quarter of a century after the settlement of the Spanish-American War. Sack, a former minister of Tsarist Russia and, after the Russian Revolution, a professor of law in Paris, authored two major works on the obligations of successor systems: The Effects of State Transformations on Their Public Debts and Other Financial Obligations and The Succession of the Public Debts of the State. With colonial territories becoming independent nation states and colonies changing hands, with monarchies being replaced by republics and military rule by civilian, with constantly changing borders throughout Europe, and with the ascendant new ideologies of socialism, communism and fascism overthrowing old orders, Sack’s debt theories dealt with the practical proble
