Three fora, one demand: Public finance should be governed by human rights law
By Juan Auz, Fiscal Justice Lead
In recent weeks, CESR and its partners have filed four submissions into three distinct international processes. Two respond to calls for input from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): one on the impact of international financial institution (IFI) conditionalities on human rights, and one on the realization of economic, social and cultural rights, the latter being prepared with the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) and the Government Revenue and Development Estimations(GRADE) initiative. The other two address the UN tax convention process - more concretely, the Co-Lead's Zero Draft of the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation - a Workstream I submission from CESR, and a submission on transparency and access to tax information from the Iniciativa por los Derechos Humanos en la Política Fiscal, of which CESR is the coordinator.
Across these submissions for three fora, core arguments form a common thread we unpack below.
The red thread: Maximum Available Resources
Each submission rests on Article 2(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the duty it imposes on States to take steps, individually and through international cooperation, to generate the maximum of available resources for the realization of human rights. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has been elaborating that duty since General Comment No. 3 in 1990, and treaty bodies and special procedures have built a substantial body of interpretation on top of it.
This duty comprises obligations such as resource mobilization, including combating tax evasion, avoidance, and illicit financial flows; equality and non-discrimination; international cooperation; extraterritorial obligations; and procedural guarantees of transparency, participation, and accountability.
The decisive point, made most explicitly in the tax convention submissions, is that this body of law is enabling. Because it was built to secure economic, social and cultural rights, it mandates States to raise revenue and to cooperate in doing so. It supplies the reason for exercising fiscal sovereignty.
Three sides of the same structural problem
Read together, the OHCHR submissions describe a single fiscal space addressed from three directions.
On the revenue side, there is much room to increase fiscal space by addressing actual inequalities. The Tax Justice Network estimates annual losses of US $492 billion to cross-border corporate tax abuse and offshore private wealth, while ECLAC puts evasion in Latin America at 6.7 percent of GDP in 2023. A modest tax on the wealthiest individuals could raise US $754 billion to US $1.3 trillion a year, a figure comparable to global public spending on health or climate adaptation.
On the outflow side, fiscal resources are being channeled towards uses that compete with the protection of human rights. Specifically, debt servicing is eroding fiscal space. G77 countries face roughly US $8 trillion in debt service in 2026, averaging 46 percent of government revenue: three times education spending, five times that on health, and 12 times social protection. A Uganda case study CESR prepared with ISER concretely illustrates how debt servicing consumed about 36.5 percent of the national budget, compared with 6.2 percent for health, 7.7 percent for education, 0.3 percent for gender and social protection, and 0.6 percent for climate. Such misallocation of funds manifestly undermines human rights protection.
This owes much to an emphasis on austerity policies rather than on investment aimed at protecting rights. In 2022, 87 percent of new IMF agreements carried austerity conditionalities, and roughly 85 percent of the world's population has lived under some form of fiscal consolidation. The submission documents what the conditionalities mean for the health budget in Ecuador, education spending in Costa Rica and Argentina, pensions and social protection in Argentina, and public wage bills across 15 countries in the Global South, as well as housing, where subsidy removal leads to energy poverty.
Tax abuse, debt service, and conditionality are three mechanisms that produce one outcome: the inability to protect human rights due to fiscal erosion. Treating them as separate policy agendas is the analytical error CESR's work aims to correct.
Human rights in international tax cooperation
The current tax convention text proposes adherence to human rights principles. Article 2(c) of the Zero Draft commits the future Convention to alignment with international human rights law. CESR's submission argues that this reference should be clarified to mean the obligations set out in UN human rights treaties as authoritatively interpreted. It then makes suggestions on the drafting itself. Three substantive commitments oblige Parties only to "explore"; elsewhere Parties "recognize" and "agree" rather than undertake traceable action. Other UN framework conventions bind Parties to develop, establish, regulate, adopt, and report – action verbs CESR advocates for inclusion.
Article 6(3) on the effective taxation of high-net-worth individuals should require Parties to adopt coordinated approaches, state plainly that such individuals are not currently taxed effectively, anchor effective taxation in ability to pay, and mandate the Conference of the Parties to define the class, since no commitment can be implemented against an undefined one.
The submission CESR coordinated on behalf of the Iniciativa por los DDHH en la Politica Fiscal does the same work on the information architecture. It targets the open-ended trade-secret and ordre public exception in Article 11(3)(c), which is discretionary enough to shield beneficial ownership and avoidance structures, and the "foreseeably relevant" standard that has operated as a barrier for lower-capacity administrations. It asks for public country-by-country reporting through a central database, public beneficial ownership registers feeding into a global asset registry, and publication of aggregate data on the effective tax rates borne by the wealthiest.
Our position is that advocacy that provides actionable verbs and reporting obligations can be enforced later.
Equality is cross-cutting
Ability to pay is derived from equality and non-discrimination. Where the wealthiest are undertaxed, financing shifts to those least able to bear it. The gender analysis addresses similar concerns. The Zero Draft is silent on gender, so CESR proposes a commitment operationalized through disaggregated data under Article 15(1) and gender-responsive public services under Article 4. The OHCHR submission on conditionalities addresses adjacent concerns by tracing the mechanism in the other direction: wage freezes hit sectors where women are overrepresented, cuts in public services increase the unpaid care burden, and time poverty forecloses education progress and formal employment. The Inter-American Court's 2025 recognition of care as a human right clarifies that a State cannot recognize care as a right while permitting tax abuse, excessive debt service, or austerity to hollow out the systems on which care depends.
Transparency and participation as rights
Under international human rights interpretation, access to publicly available information is the rule and secrecy the exception. Confidentiality is a legitimate entitlement of natural persons, not of corporate structures, and restrictions must satisfy the requirements of legality, necessity, and proportionality. The same principle applies to the IMF, whose programs are negotiated behind closed doors. Argentina's 2018 stand-by agreement was concluded without an enabling law, a formal administrative act, or technical opinions.
The ecological dimension
CESCR General Comment No. 27 on the environmental dimension of sustainable development ties environmental degradation to the maximum-available-resources obligation and points to progressive taxation and a just transition. The submissions aim to push this into treaty language: common but differentiated responsibilities and the polluter-pays principle in Article 4 of the tax convention, and assessment of the extraterritorial effects of tax measures, incentives and secrecy rules. Servicing external debt drives extractivism, and one study finds 47 of 66 developing countries would default if they made the climate investments the 2030 Agenda requires.
Conclusion: What does all of this mean?
The four texts converge on a single proposition: the resources a State can command are not a fact of nature, but the product of decisions made in tax treaties, loan agreements, and debt contracts, and those decisions are already governed by law. With these submissions, we aim to go beyond recognition, which international human rights organs have already outlined. We want to translate that outline into language that binds and can be checked. Verbs that oblige rather than invite. Reporting obligations that make performance visible. Registers and disclosures that let the public see who pays what. Seats at the table for those who bear the consequences. Whether that translation happens in this cycle or is deferred to the next will be settled in the remaining sessions of the tax convention negotiation and in the OHCHR reports now being drafted.
Tax justice, debt justice, gender justice, and climate justice are not four agendas. They are one obligation, argued in whichever forum we have access to.
