Social Watch News

The importance of international—or even better, global—cooperation on tax issues is becoming more and more evident in the light of tax evasion and avoidance scandals during the last few months and years. Countries in the global North and South were shown to offer preferential treatment to foreigners—from Panama to Luxemburg from the Cayman Islands to Hong Kong. Individuals as well as huge transnational corporations are using a fragmented and inconsistently regulated global system of trans-border taxation to evade and/or avoid taxes. The sums lost amount to hundreds of billions annually. Depending on the model of estimation, developing countries are losing more than one trillion US dollars per year in illicit financial flows, the majority of which can be attributed to the abuse of transfer pricing rules. A panel of the UN Economic Commission for Africa chaired by former South African president Thabo Mbeki estimates the losses of Africa alone at approximately 50 billion US dollars per year. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) puts global revenue losses from Base Erosion and Profit Shifting at an annual 100 to 240 billion US dollars.

Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND) releases the Mutual Accountability Manual on the roles of Different Stakeholders in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This guide provides assisting tools for the civil society to play its role within the framework of accountability of the parties concerned with the developmental process, from the public sector as a key partner in the development process and its basic point of reference in the context of policy-making and ensuring the proper implementation and protection of the rights of the citizens, to the private sector as a partner who is supposed to adhere to international standards of human rights, and the donors who are committed to providing the necessary resources for the implementation of the development process and achieving the goals of civil society.

What do the human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination mean for tax policy? This is the question at the center of the first in a series of four advocacy tools on tax policy and human rights produced by RightingFinance.

The aim of the advocacy tools is to assist education and dissemination of the standards on tax policy and human rights contained in a report produced by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in 2014 (“the report”). Each of them contains a section on the normative foundations of the principles in question, another on their applications to tax policy – including explanations and references to practical examples – and a third one with guiding questions for reflection.

During the session on “accountability and transparency of multi-stakeholder partnerships” held in the framework of the Partnership Forum at the UN, Barbara Adams from Global Policy Forum and Social Watch said that partnerships are based in a win-win dynamic but there is a need to understand of what is "win-win".

Would be beneficiaries of such initiatives have to be included, she argued. "We need to look and see how the contribution of partnerships has benefits. We need a more systemic approach when we are looking at the win-win approach".