Declaration of the World Assembly of the CADTM International Network in Cotonou on 3 August 2026

4 August by CADTM

1. We, the delegates to the 8^th World Assembly of CADTM — the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt , from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe and North America, gathered in Cotonou, Benin, from July 31- August 3, 2026, reaffirm our common struggle against illegitimate debt : a mechanism that transfers the wealth created by workers, peasants and the working classes to the benefit of creditors, capitalists and the ruling classes in both the South and the North. We pledge to continue our struggle against the capitalist system which destroys Nature, generates, exacerbates and perpetuates exploitation, inequality and oppression across the globe, and which perpetuates and reinforces patriarchy, racism, the caste system, communitarianism, xenophobia, ultra-nationalism and religious fundamentalism.
2. We declare that the peoples of the world are facing a new and increasingly severe debt crisis, caused not by their own choices but by policies imposed by the ruling classes, particularly in the North, with the complicity of elites in the South, taking advantage of successive external shocks: the Covid-19 pandemic; the war in Ukraine and the surge in food and energy prices; the sharp rises in interest rates decided by the central banks of the North from 2022 onwards; and now the repercussions of the war against Iran and in the Strait of Hormuz, and more broadly across the Gulf region, which have driven up the costs of energy, freight and fertilisers, destroyed livelihoods and displaced workers across entire regions. Countries in the Global South are being forced to pay the price for shocks generated at the very heart of the global system, whilst household debt is crushing working-class people in both the Global North and the Global South.
3. We condemn the mechanisms imposed by creditors and presented as ‘solutions’ to this crisis. The restructuring measures carried out under the G20 Common Framework and IMF programmes have protected private and multilateral creditors far more effectively than the affected populations. The G20 has conceded derisory reductions in bilateral debt and has merely deferred payment deadlines. Consequently, the countries concerned have been forced to resume repayments. The neoliberal conditionalities imposed in particular by the IMF and the World Bank have been reinforced and have led to a dramatic worsening of the situation facing economies and the working classes.
4. We demand the immediate and unconditional cancellation of all illegitimate, illegal, odious and unsustainable debts — public and private, external and internal. We urge Global South governments to exercise their sovereign right to unilaterally suspend debt repayments, to carry out debt audits with ample participation of social movements and the working classes, and to repudiate debts incurred that harm their peoples. Recent legal and constitutional victories have clearly demonstrated that illegitimate debts can be identified, declared null and void, and cancelled. We are committed to making citizen-led debt audits and popular education the norm so that every worker, farmer, student and resident of working-class neighbourhoods can understand a financial system that has been deliberately made esoteric.
5. Our demand for transparency, audit and cancellation applies to all creditors without exception: private lenders, multilateral institutions and bilateral lenders. We reject both the propaganda that singles out a single creditor to exonerate the others and any complacency towards powers whose loans reproduce the same logic as those of other lenders. The BRICS countries and their New Development Bank do not represent an alternative for the peoples: their governments apply the same neoliberal policies, maintain growing commercial and military ties with the genocidal Israeli state, and several of them pursue their own imperialist or sub-imperialist policies. What matters to CADTM is the exercise of peoples’ sovereignty over their resources and budgets.
6. We reiterate our call for the abolition of all forms of illegitimate private debt imposed on the working classes: exploitative microcredit, fintech and digital loans, peasant debt, student debt and household debt incurred simply to survive. Presented as instruments of ‘financial inclusion’ and women’s empowerment — women making up the majority of their victims — these systems of predatory interest rates and dispossession have plunged hundreds of millions of families into debt bondage, dispossessed them of their land and led to a rise in suicides. The struggle against the debt system is inseparable from the feminist struggle: austerity forces women to make up for the lack of public services through the unpaid work of education and care that they provide in the home. Women are exploited both as wage earners and as small-scale producers, small traders and craftswomen, and in terms of social reproduction through the domestic tasks for which they bear the main burden. Privatisation and cuts to subsidies for public services have a greater impact on women than on men do. All women, whether in paid employment or not, are heavily exploited and play an active role in the struggles for emancipation. It is women who are on the front line of the resistance.
7. We declare that the climate catastrophe and the debt system now constitute a single mechanism of dispossession. Countries devastated by cyclones, floods, droughts and heatwaves to which they have contributed almost nothing are forced to borrow for their reconstruction from the very institutions whose model has created their vulnerability. We reject climate finance in the form of debt-generating instruments — carbon markets, ‘debt-for-nature’ and ‘debt-for-climate’ swaps, resilience bonds and conditional mechanisms — and demand that such finance take the form of unconditional grants and reparations for the ecological debt that the industrialised North and its corporations owe to the peoples of the South.
8. We demand reparations for the historical crimes that have shaped the current world order: colonisation, slavery and the slave trade, genocide and forced displacements. We demand the restitution of the tribute extorted from peoples who paid a ransom for their freedom, the cancellation of debts inherited from colonial, apartheid and dictatorial regimes, and the unconditional restitution of sovereign assets frozen by imperialist powers as a form of collective punishment inflicted on entire populations.
9. The World Assembly of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM) condemns state and international repression in Haiti, demands full repayment of the historic ‘independence debt’ and categorically rejects any form of military intervention or foreign interference. We denounce the fact that the criminal gangs terrorising the civilian population have been exploited by the ruling powers to fragment the social fabric and stifle popular mobilisation. We condemn the state-sanctioned persecution of trade unions, farmers’ organisations and student groups who are peacefully resisting in the streets. Similarly, we reject the deliberate humanitarian crisis, which is unfolding with the complicity of local authorities in the face of a structural lack of food, healthcare and basic services, thereby exacerbating the suffering of the Haitian people; We therefore demand historical reparation for the dual debt: that which France incurred as a result of the colonial extortion that forced Haiti to pay 150 million francs, and reparation for the obstacles imposed by French banks, which lent money at usurious rates so that Haiti could settle this debt.
10. We reaffirm our unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people, victims of the ongoing Zionist genocide, which constitutes the central political issue of our time. We demand an immediate end to the genocide, the occupation and the ecocide; the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people; the termination of the Abraham Accords and all military, economic, academic and cultural agreements with Israel; and full support for the proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. We denounce the Israeli aggression against Lebanon and the ongoing ecocide on its territory. The working classes across the world bear the consequences of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, which we condemn.
11. We express our support for the people of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, who have been suffering for several decades, and the plundering of their natural resources by large private companies and countries such as Rwanda that use the violence of armed groups and their own troops to achieve their objectives. We stand with all local communities, especially women, who are the main victims of these attacks, as rape is used as a weapon of war and subjugation. Millions of victims exist.
12. We also stand in solidarity with the people of Sudan and the surrounding region who, having overthrown a dictatorship, have for several years been subjected to violence perpetrated by both the official army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), backed by the United Arab Emirates, which are responsible for a large number of massacres.
13. We condemn the interference of the major powers and their support for dictatorial, totalitarian, police states and military regimes, which are spreading across the globe at a time when peoples are fighting for their emancipation, their dignity, their rights and the restoration of their sovereignty over their resources and territories. We condemn the imperialist and terrorist attacks against the countries of the Sahel.
14. We condemn the imperialist aggression against Cuba and demand the immediate lifting of the criminal blockade that has been strangling the Cuban people for more than six decades. We also condemn the aggression against Venezuela and the seizure of its resources, as well as any act of imperialist aggression against the sovereignty of peoples, whatever its origin. We oppose the U.S.-led imperialist camp and equally condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and any major power war that harms people.
15. We sound the alarm at the global rise of the far right and neo-fascism — in the Americas, Europe, Asia and beyond — through which certain factions of big business seek to crush social gains by open force, to make migrants and minorities scapegoats, and to dismantle democratic rights. The struggle against fascism, racism and all forms of supremacism (white, cultural, religious, etc.) is today inseparable from the struggle against the debt system and imperialism. In this spirit, we welcome the First International Anti-Fascist Conference for the Sovereignty of Peoples, held in Porto Alegre in March 2026, which brought together activists and public figures from some forty countries to form a common global front against neo-fascism and imperialism – a decisive step in building the international resistance that our times demand. CADTM is committed to integrating this anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle into every aspect of its work, and to actively contributing to efforts to forge the broadest possible international front against the rise of fascism and against imperialist aggression, whatever its origin.
16. We condemn the escalation of violations of the rights of women, religious, ethnic, linguistic and national minorities, indigenous peoples, Dalits and oppressed castes, and all marginalised and oppressed groups throughout the world. Gender apartheid, the erasure of women from public life, communal violence, attacks on the right to diversity, the creation of stateless and ‘deportable’ populations, the dispossession of indigenous communities for the sake of extractive projects, and the persecution of the descendants of slaves… are not aberrations, but instruments through which the ruling classes divide the exploited, divert the anger fuelled by the debt system and austerity towards scapegoats, and discipline the workforce of the most oppressed. We affirm that there can be no debt justice without equality, dignity and the full and complete rights of women and all oppressed peoples and communities, and we commit to placing their struggles at the heart of our common struggle.
17. We condemn the outsourcing by European countries and the United States of their border controls to third countries, detention camps, mass deportations and the criminalisation of solidarity. Far from being debtors, migrants are creditors of this system: their remittances contribute to the repayment of their countries’ external debt, while their labour creates wealth that benefits the economies that exploit and persecute them. We defend the right of every human being to move and settle, and we demand reparations for peoples whose displacement has been caused by war, plunder, structural adjustment and climate change.
18. We condemn the rampant militarisation of the planet: the explosion in military budgets, the rearmament of the imperialist powers and their allies, and the war economy which diverts colossal resources away from healthcare, education, housing and the fight against climate change, whilst new debts are incurred to finance the purchase of weapons. We demand that budgets be redirected towards vital social sectors, with priority given to public services. Not a penny for war: everything for life.
19. We demand the repeal of free trade, investment and economic partnership agreements which, like the debt system, are complementary instruments of domination, plunder and subjugation of the peoples of the impoverished Global South. Whilst debt is used to impose neoliberal policies, structural adjustment programmes and the dismantling of economic and social protections, these agreements legally enforce the liberalisation of trade and investment, strengthen the power of multinationals over resources, public services and strategic sectors, and perpetuate economic, food, technological and financial dependence. We demand the development of an alternative model of economic and trade cooperation based on solidarity between peoples, complementarity, social justice, popular sovereignty and respect for human rights and the environment, prioritising the needs of the people over the profits of multinationals.
20. We demand tax justice as an alternative to perpetual debt: a highly progressive tax system on wealth, on corporate and financial sector profits, and on extractive industries; the abolition of tax havens; and the recovery of illicit financial flows which, every year, deprive the Global South of sums far greater than what it receives in so-called ‘aid’. Governments that claim to serve their people must make the wealthy pay, rather than borrowing from them at usurious rates and taxing the poor through VAT.
21. We demand food sovereignty and the sovereignty of peoples over their land, water, fisheries, forests and mineral resources: public ownership and democratic management of strategic resources, communities’ enforceable right to consent, an end to the grabbing of land, water and the oceans, and a break with the export-oriented agribusiness and extractivist model — including the ‘green’ extractivism of a false energy transition that reproduces colonial plunder under a new name.
22. We welcome the extraordinary wave of popular uprisings that has shaken the world in recent years, led above all by young people and women — from the mass movements against austerity, corruption and authoritarianism across several continents to the huge demonstrations of solidarity with Palestine. These revolts have shown that no regime is invincible. The lesson is equally clear: revolts lacking organised popular political instruments are co-opted by the very forces against which they are directed. We are committed to joining and standing alongside these movements, their forms of resistance and organisation, to fight for their social and democratic demands — jobs, wages, public services, democracy, debt cancellation — and to help transform the energy of revolt into a sustainable organisation.
23. We leave Cotonou determined to strengthen CADTM’s international network across all continents: to develop popular education on debt in the languages of the people; to support and launch citizens’ debt audits; to deepen the alliance between the struggle against debt and feminist, environmentalist, peasant, trade union, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist movements; and to move towards a world free from the dictatorship of debt — a world of popular sovereignty, social justice, climate justice and equality among all human beings. In accordance with the fundamental moral principle of our network, we always stand alongside those who are fighting: we stand with all exploited and oppressed people who are resisting, everywhere on the planet.

Adopted by the 8^th CADTM World Assembly, Cotonou, Benin, August 2026