A Queens assemblywoman and a Brooklyn housing organizer are pushing New York to slam shut a legal opening that lets so-called vulture funds haul struggling countries into state court and squeeze them for years, in an op-ed published June 4 in the New York Daily News by Assemblywoman Gonzalez-Rojas and Solano, the executive director and co-founder of Churches United For Fair Housing.

The opening is called the champerty loophole. Vulture funds are hedge funds that buy up a distressed country’s national debt on the cheap after that country is already in economic trouble. Then they sue for full repayment plus interest, and they drag the fights out to run up the payout. Gonzalez-Rojas and Solano write that most creditors settle sovereign debt out of court and take a holistic look at the whole portfolio. Vulture funds do the opposite, buying in precisely because the debt is dirt cheap and holding up recovery to make more money while schools, hospitals and basic services in those countries go unfunded.

More than half of the world’s sovereign debt bonds are governed under New York state law, per the op-ed. When a vulture fund wants to sue a country in crisis, it does it here.