Tax Justice Focus – the Human Rights edition

The latest edition of our newsletter Tax Justice Focus focuses on the theme of tax justice and human rights, perhaps the fastest-growing area of interest in the rapidly expanding global tax justice community.

Click here for the full edition of Tax Justice Focus, the Human Rights edition.

You can also access the individual articles below.

Adrienne Margolis, guest editor, notes in her editorial Tax Justice and Human Rights: the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship? that tax policy has wide-ranging implications for human rights throughout the world, not least because financial secrecy is indispensible to modern tyranny. Now, law, accountancy and economics stand to be transformed as the public trace the connections.

Magdalena Sepúlveda, former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, explains in her article Taxation for Human Rights that states have a self-imposed duty to deploy “the maximum available resources” to secure the human rights of their population. Fiscal policies mean that many of them are currently failing in that duty.

The subsequent article by Lloyd Lipsett, rapporteur for the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute Task Force on Illicit Financial Flows, Poverty and Human Rights, explores how lawyers have played an important role in creating the offshore system. Lloyd Lipsett argues that they cannot wash their hands of responsibility for its impact on fundamental human rights.

We then host Prof. Thomas Pogge of Yale University, who notes in his article Human Rights and Just Taxation that around half the world’s population is denied the right to an adequate standard of living – and this will be remedied if their governments can secure adequate tax revenues from large companies and wealthy individuals.

Our final feature article, The Celtic Chimera, is by Prof. William K. Black of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Ireland has been at the forefront of moves to bring the offshore model into the heart of the onshore economic system – and it is also suffering disproportionately from the impact of austerity. These two facts, he notes, are connected.

The full edition of Tax Justice Focus also includes a tax justice-focused review of Thomas Piketty’s world famous book Capital in the Twenty First Century – along with further news, views and updates. Click here.

See all the past editions of Tax Justice Focus here. Or, if you prefer, read them on your mobile devices via the free TJN app, available for Apple and Android.