Greek Parliamentary Debt Committee Declares All Debt Illegal

Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.

For a while now, I’ve had a German saying floating around my files, that I didn’t really know what to do with. I know now. The saying is:

In der Not ist der Mittelweg der Tod.

Which loosely translates as:

In emergencies, the middle ground is lethal.

It seems like the Greek parliament thinks along just those lines. A preliminary report issued today declares all debt illegal. You can read the entire report behind the link. Here is chapter 8, Asessments of the Debt. I’d say this is somewhat inflammatory.

Hellenic Parliament’s Debt Truth Committee Preliminary Findings – Executive Summary of the report

Chapter 8, Assessment of the Debts as regards illegtimacy, odiousness, illegality, and unsustainability, provides an assessment of the Greek public debt according to the definitions regarding illegitimate, odious, illegal, and unsustainable debt adopted by the Committee.

Chapter 8 concludes that the Greek public debt as of June 2015 is unsustainable, since Greece is currently unable to service its debt without seriously impairing its capacity to fulfill its basic human rights obligations. Furthermore, for each creditor, the report provides evidence of indicative cases of illegal, illegitimate and odious debts.

• Debt to the IMF should be considered illegal since its concession breached the IMF’s own statutes, and its conditions breached the Greek Constitution, international customary law, and treaties to which Greece is a party. It is also illegitimate, since conditions included policy prescriptions that infringed human rights obligations. Finally, it is odious since the IMF knew that the imposed measures were undemocratic, ineffective, and would lead to serious violations of socio-economic rights.

• Debts to the ECB should be considered illegal since the ECB over-stepped its mandate by imposing the application of macroeconomic adjustment programs (e.g. labour market deregulation) via its participation in the Troïka. Debts to the ECB are also illegitimate and odious, since the principal raison d’etre of the Securities Market Programme (SMP) was to serve the interests of the financial institutions, allowing the major European and Greek private banks to dispose of their Greek bonds.

• The EFSF engages in cash-less loans which should be considered illegal because Article 122(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) was

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