Over the last several years, as throughout its history, the legal concept of odious debts has generated heated debates, but few concrete proposals have emerged for a workable definition of the issue at stake, let alone proposals for its resolution. There have been cases when a successor state has refused to honor certain debts contracted by its predecessor state. Depending on the reason for the repudiation, such cases have been classified under the labels of “war debts”, “subjugation debts” or “regime debts”. But all attempts at defining the expression “odious debts” beyond these few categories have met with insurmountable difficulties, so much so that even the International Law Commission, while discussing the issue in its work on state succession, for various reasons ended up not including the concept in the final text of the Convention on succession to property, archives and debts. Nor have later attempts found any greater success. To the contrary, the very extension of the debate to cases of governmental (rather than state) succession, and the application of the concept to such diverse categories as those of “illegitimate”, “criminal”, “illegal” and “ineffective” debts, have further confused an already vague concept and diminishing its practical value in answering real problems.