Imran Khan renews call for debt suspension of poor countries

Prime Minister Imran Khan Friday proposed a ten-point agenda to world leaders to avert economic collapse due to the Covid-19 pandemic and called for debt suspension, drawing rights of USD $500 billion and return of stolen assets stashed in rich countries.

He was addressing the U.N. General Assembly’s two-day special session, which opened Thursday, on the response to the deadly coronavirus pandemic and forge a united path forward to better recovery, including access to a vaccine.

In a recorded video message to the Summit from Islamabad, the Prime Minister proposed the emergency plan for financial support to the developing countries and said the pandemic caused immense human suffering and created the deepest global economic contraction since the great depression of the 1930s.

Khan pointed out that nearly 100 million people in developing countries would fall back into extreme poverty while on the other hand, the rich countries had injected $13 trillion as the fiscal stimulus to revive their economies.

“Developing countries just do not have the resources to afford such a massive economic stimulus … They are struggling to find even a fraction of the $ 2-3 trillion they require to recover from the pandemic,” Imran Khan said.