From June 24 to June 25, 2024, CESR participated in a two-day workshop in Tunis on the role of African countries in defining global tax rules, hosted by the Tunisian Observatory of the Economy (OTE) and Tax Justice Network Africa (TJNA).
The workshop's purpose was to create a pan-African space to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the ongoing UN Tax Convention process and facilitate regional coalitions to advocate for progressive reforms in this regard.
The Conference was well attended and included a broad swath of African civil society from every region, as well as representatives from prominent INGOs such as GI-ESCR, GATJ, and ActionAid.
CESR was invited to highlight the transformative potential that human rights have for the Convention currently being negotiated at the UN to make international tax cooperation more effective and inclusive. Our Program Associate, Ohene Yaw Ampofo-Anti, explained the link between human rights and fiscal policy by introducing CESR’s Rights-based economy model as an alternative to the dominant neoliberal economic model as well as demonstrating how human rights shift the debate on fiscal policy. For instance, he discussed how human rights provide a normative basis for utilizing the redistributive potential of fiscal policy and taxation as a vehicle for reparations for slavery and colonialism.
He also touched on the significant uptake of human rights norms in submissions made in the process of building the terms of reference of the UN Convention by states, civil society, and trade unions. Drawing on CESR’s recent submission on the zero draft of the Terms of Reference, he shed light on where the draft is going right, such as its inclusion of rights-aligned procedural norms around participation, agenda setting, and decision making as well as substantive considerations, including linking taxation to sustainable development, wealth taxes and combating illicit financial flows. Conversely, he explained how the zero draft fails to make the realization and resourcing of human rights an explicit goal of international tax cooperation, fails to incorporate key human rights standards such as extraterritorial obligations and the duty to cooperate, and does not deal with climate-related obligations in a robust fashion. In closing, he highlighted how, both procedurally and substantively, the OECD’s Two-Pillar Solution is a clear example of what happens when human rights norms are not adhered to.
CESR’s presentation was well received, and participants found the Rights-Based Economy approach innovative and tied to continental demands around feminist and reparations-based approaches to fiscal policy.
As the Ad Hoc Committee is set to meet in the last week of July and the terms of reference for a UN Tax Convention are finalized, CESR will continue to argue for rights-aligned, feminist, and decolonial approaches to transforming the international financial architecture, which places the power and universality of human rights at the center.