Jubilee 2000

Campaign Platform

At the local, regional, national, and international levels, the most explicit goals of this nonviolent campaign were to persuade the G-8 (the eight wealthiest countries of the world) to offer their unconditional participation in debt cancellation, signifying their solidarity with the Third World; to empower First World audiences with information about the debt crisis and expose them to the kinds of structural injustice resulting from a coun-try's debt—a population's widespread suffering due to poverty; to inspire involvement in the international financial process; to advocate for a new, democratically influenced, transparent financial order, one that could support justice and human rights, free Third World countries from the burden of debt, and create the legal means to assure a country adequate time and tools for proper restructuring and development of economic credibility (a form of international bankruptcy protection); to lobby against and eliminate harsh, unfair, unfavorable, and/or corrupt policies and politics (visible and invisible) imposed by the IMF, the World Bank, international creditors, and political leaders; and to gain the support of the United Nations and other international organizations that would help to ensure the pursuit of international law and international human rights for all.

The Campaign's Impact

Advocating their case to the world with its professional research teams, Jubilee 2000 UK succeeded in creating a sense of global awareness of debt issues. The campaign effort achieved international mass media attention that attracted the support of well-known scholars, international figures, celebrities (Youssou N'Dour, U2's Bono, Muhammad Ali, the Spice Girls), and religious figures (Pope John Paul II). The sentiment of Jubilee 2000 continues today as the Jubilee Movement International (JMI), which includes Jubilee South, Jubilee USA, and [Page 605]Jubilee Australia, and Jubilee UK. Each organization collaborates in research efforts to fight for social economic change and contributes to the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Jubilee Research and JMI have supported campaigns like Make Poverty History and have brought the issue of Third World debt to the fore of the G-8 and media agenda, evidence that Jubilee networks are successfully creating a mainstream space for radical global resistance against international public debt and the poverty it creates.

...