Taxation is a crucial instrument for the realization of human rights, not just because it is necessary for ensuring sufficient resources, but also because tax policy plays a fundamental role in redressing inequalities and in shaping how accountable governments are to their people.
Yet many countries struggle to collect sufficient revenue to fund public services essential for people to realize fundamental rights such as to health, education, housing, access to justice and an adequate standard of living. Meanwhile, unjust tax systems, at both the national and global levels, too often fuel rising inequality and widening disparities in human rights enjoyment, shifting the ???burden??? of taxation onto society???s least well-off and concentrating wealth in the hands of a privileged few. In recent years, this basic unfairness has eroded trust in government institutions, which are often perceived as more accountable to economic elites and international donors than to their own people.
The inadequacy and inequity of tax regimes is also a growing issue in debates to agree a new set of sustainable development commitments to replace the MDGs in 2015. Domestic resource mobilization has increasingly been recognized as a key determinant of poverty eradication, while the role of large-scale tax evasion, including through the use of secrecy jurisdictions and transfer mispricing, in undermining development has become clear.???
Against this backdrop, human rights standards offer a powerful, universal and comprehensive normative framework in which to ground claims for tax justice. The duty to devote the ???maximum available resources??? to economic, social and cultural rights gives legal force to demands for effective and equitable taxation systems which contribute to the realization of human rights for all, while the principles of ???equality??? and ???non-discrimination???, as elucidated in international standards, can reinforce understandings of ??equity??, a concept often trumped in traditional tax discourse by the pursuit of ???efficiency???. By recasting the relationship between human beings and state institutions in terms of rights-holders and corresponding duty-bearers, human rights can also contribute to greater accountability, participation and responsiveness in matters of fiscal policy. Moreover, framing tax as a human rights issue takes it beyond the elite technocratic sphere and into the arena of legitimate public scrutiny and debate.
Multidisciplinary collaboration between the tax justice community and the human rights movement remains relatively nascent, however. There is a pressing need to explore how the standards, instruments and mechanisms of human rights can be better deployed to bolster the resourcing, redistributive and accountability functions of taxation.???
For over a decade, CESR has been using innovative methodologies to trace the link between resource generation and rights fulfillment. Our groundbreaking work in Guatemala, Ireland, Spain, and more recently Egypt, is complemented by international advocacy efforts on key issues such as the financial transaction tax and the incorporation of tax justice in the post-2015 sustainable development goals.
In the next phase of our strategy, CESR will be working to strengthen the capacity of tax justice and human rights advocates to work together. This will involve the production of new tools and resources, and the creation of spaces to develop a common knowledge and advocacy base. These efforts will also build upon CESR???s collaboration with the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in drafting a new report on fiscal policy and human rights.
Through our partnerships with national tax justice organizations, CESR will also
challenge unfair tax policies in a variety of settings, including in the contexts of austerity in Europe, inequality amongst growth in middle-income countries, and in fragile political transitions. The Center is also working to ensure the Council of Europe???s December 2013 recommendations on tax policy, which were drafted by CESR, are taken up by NHRIs and civil society organizations so as to drive human rights alternatives to austerity in select European countries.
The period ahead will also see the Center working closely with global alliances to leverage human rights standards, instruments and mechanisms to combat international tax abuse and finance the post-2015 sustainable development goals.
As we look to the future in a world wrought with increasing inequalities alongside increasing resource scarcity, tax justice is sure to become an evermore urgent issue. CESR and its partners will be working closely to unleash the powerful potential of a human rights-centered approach to taxation.