(including public education), or for structural anti-capitalist reforms, or again to resist the neoliberal offensive. He was particularly active in strikes and workers' movements in Liège (where he was a teacher) where the population was overwhelmed by the burden of the city's public debt throughout the 1980s. The notion of international solidarity has had an ever growing influence in his activities and reflections: solidarity with the strikers in Poland in 1980, the British miners in 1984–1985, support for revolutionary experiences by organizing voluntary work brigades to help the farmers in Nicaragua between 1979 and 1989, solidarity against the repression used to quell the "Tiananmen square demonstration" in 1989, opposition to the blockade imposed on Cuba by the United States government, support for the Palestinian struggle and many other struggles around the world. In 1990, he contributed to the creation of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM – Henceforth 'Committee for the abolition of illegitimate debt') and became its president. This committee is now an international network that operates in thirty countries on four continents. In 1999, he participated in the creation of ATTAC Belgium and the World Social Forum in Brazil and its international council in 2001, the European Social Forum in 2002, and the Alter Summit in 2012. Since 2000, he has been involved with leftist governments and popular movements in Latin American and elsewhere on the themes of debt, the Bank of the South and other alternatives. In 2003, he advised the new Timor-Leste government on relations with the IMF and the World Bank. In 2005, and in 2008, he was invited by the Economic Commission of the African Union to present propositions on the abolition of illegitimate debts demanded from African countries. In 2005, he took part, with left wing Argentine economists, in the creation of the International Debt Observatory. With the North in the throes of a debt crisis since 2007–2008, Toussaint has worked for the launching and strengthening of citizens' debt audits in Europe. Toussaint took part in Ecuador's Debt Audit Commission (Comisión para la Auditoria Integral de la Deuda Pública -CAIC), created by the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, that sat in 2007. In the same year he advised the President and the Minister of Finance of Ecuador on the creation of a "Bank of the South". The following year he was consulted as an expert on the same matter by