Professor Grégoire Mallard of the Anthropology and Sociology Department writes on Decolonization and Sovereign Debt Obligations in International Public Law in the recently published work entitled Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony.
Professor Mallard's chapter "We Owe You Nothing: Decolonization and Sovereign Debt Obligations in International Public Law" analyses how the context of decolonisation gave rise to a new discourse in international public law on the legitimacy and legality of sovereign debts contracted during the colonial times. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with the concerned lawyers, in particular Mohammed Bedjaoui, Grégoire Mallard focuses on the twenty-year-long effort started in the 1960s by the ILC to codify the doctrine on the law of State Succession in respect to State Property, Archives and Debts, which led to the adoption of the so-named Convention by a majority of newly independent states in 1983 (in Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony, P. Penet and J. Flores Zendejas, eds., Oxford University Press, April 2021). In doing so, he highlights the tools that international public law gave to the global movement in favour of the cancellation of sovereign debts contracted during colonial times.