Multilateral Debt Relief Under HIPC – global Governance Perspectives

Part II of this study has been devoted to the legal analysis of the HIPC Initiative under the institutional law of the IMF and the World Bank and public international law. It revealed the Initiative's soft-law nature but gave little evidence on the program's de facto regulatory capacities. Hence, Part III of this study will extend the legal analysis of the HIPC program beyond the legal realm of Art. 38 ICJ Statute, in order to analyze the various informal mechanisms of HIPC debt relief by means of global governance tools. It is devoted to HIPC as a governance phenomenon and will inquire into the power of the IMF and World Bank in steering the creditor-debtor relationship under the HIPC program. To achieve this, Part III will take recourse to the emerging School of Global Administrative Law (GAL), which has focused its scholarly interest and attention on the increasing number of informal regulatory mechanisms within the international legal order; the School of GAL shares with this study the aim to further structure and analyze those informal, soft-law structures and mechanisms.

The soft law character of the HIPC Initiative represents a broader phenomenon. International lawyers are increasingly confronted with a growing number of global issue areas and programs which are of a soft law nature and fall beyond the radar screen of international law. The move away from legal formalism is continuing, and the reluctance of the relevant actors to employ legally binding tools for regulating those issues is more and more common. As a consequence thereof, the value of public international law in providing a distinction between legal and illegal actions on the basis of Art. 38 of the ICJ Statute diminishes. Public international law has failed sufficiently to acknowledge and further specify the broad range of existing soft law instruments; as a result, research tools and concepts which have been derived from other academic disciplines have gained more prominence and influence. They allow exploration of soft law issues beyond the scope of the legal domain and its national and international delimitations.