We citizens need an international tribunal where we can have our odious sovereign debts recognized as odious credits.

Sir I refer to Ricardo Hausmann’s “Venezuela’s economic collapse owes a debt to China” January 21. It reflects much of what I have been writing for years as a columnist in Venezuela… before I was censured in July 2014

Hausmann writes: “the debt was never authorised by the Venezuelan parliament due to the specious argument that it was not debt, but “finance”, because it was not to be paid in dollars but in oil. As a consequence, spending the money was never part of the national budget, thus escaping all forms of control and bypassing oil-revenue sharing rules, which would have transferred part of the income to opposition state and local governments.”

He is absolutely right but, it is even worse than that, since Venezuela’s Constitution explicitly prohibits encumbering not extracted oil that way.

And so now the real question is: In the future, when these odious credits from China are declared odious debts not to be paid, how much is the rest of the world going to support us Venezuelans?

Should there not exist an international tribunal were citizens can go and have their grievances on odious debts be recognized as odious credits? I mean we could be talking about much more than China.