About International Peoples’ Tribunal 2025

History

Raising voice against IMF and World Bank atrocity

International People’s Tribunal 2025, Kathmandu, Nepal

The Bretton Woods Institutions and the wealthy countries that own and control the International Monetary Fund and World Bank started with the intention to aid Europe’s post-Second World War reconstruction but soon shifted their focus to the Global South, positioning themselves as engines of global welfare, economic growth, and development. Yet, behind this rhetoric lay a complex, often coercive system of interventions that dictated the national policies of many Global South countries, enforcing a one-size-fits-all model of development that has proven, at best, deeply flawed and, at worst, exploitative. These institutions promote neoliberalism, debt crisis, consumerism, structural transformation, and privatization worldwide, weakening developing and underdeveloped countries and continuing the hypocrisy of wealthy nations. They also appropriate their interventions by putting the global north on the pedestal of generous moneylenders who fill their pockets while deepening the financial grave.

It has been 8 decades since these institutions have been wielding their power and influence to maintain a deeply unequal, unjust, profit-driven, and extractive status quo, continuing to exploit resources from Global South to serve neoliberal interests, whose historical and continuing harms against people and the planet we know only too well. Despite their denials, structural adjustment and austerity conditionalities are still being imposed on governments, forcing them to borrow, from regressive tax laws to wage freezes in the public sector. The IMF and the World Bank also continue to push more loans as their main solution to crises, ignoring the consequences of their actions and their prescriptions and policies in producing and/or exacerbating the multiple crises. They again have opened new lending facilities for burning crises such as climate change and other catastrophes while persisting in subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and funding fossil fuel projects despite claims to the contrary.

As a form of our continuing struggle, Nepal Steering Committee, IPT is organizing International Peoples’ Tribunal (IPT) VS IMF/WB which is a forum of alternative justice organized by social justice movements and organizations to adjudicate cases indicting the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for crimes against people and the planet in eight decades of their existence. It offers a powerful opportunity to raise our analysis and critique of the IMF-WB, increase awareness through popular education and various forms of media, inspire public actions, challenge their narratives and false solutions, and erode their power and legitimacy. Exposing and resisting these leading financial institutions must be sustained and advanced.