This article develops the argument that non-cosmopolitan considerations of justice justify relief of sovereign debt for highly indebted poor states. In particular, the article claims that considerations of national determination warrant some debt-forgiveness in the backdrop of unfair terms of global interaction. In a context of inequality, poor countries cannot generally afford to disregard the costs of ignoring the interests of the wealthiest states. Patterns of unbalanced interaction undermine national self-determination by limiting the poor countries' effective capacity to choose between (...) different policies to achieve development and other worthy goals. In concrete, this article suggests that unequal terms of interaction constrain national self-determination by making of sovereign debt an 'escape mechanism' in the absence of rival alternatives to palliate the effects of underdevelopment and related afflictions, despite the causes of sovereign debt being partly domestic, possibly. Thus, this paper views national self-determination as dependent on the availability of acceptable (non-unbearably burdensome) policy options on the part of states. (shrink)

When should binding debt contracts not be repaid? This article argues that whenever the repayment of sovereign debt threatens the human rights of the citizenry, this provides a weighty normative reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the latter over the former. Since there are specific, non-coincidental reasons to fear that a high indebtedness of states may result in the undermining of the socio-economic and the collective human rights of a state’s citizenry, the more specific thesis defended in this article is (...) the following: whenever debt repayment undermines the socio-economic and collective human rights of the state´s citizenry, states have a normatively weighty reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the citizen’s human rights over meeting their contractual debt payment obligations vis-à-vis their creditors. (shrink)