Defending human rights around the world requires funding

We live in a time when major global challenges—inequality, the climate crisis, and technological transformations, among others—require governments to have greater capacity to guarantee rights and promote the well-being of their populations. However, addressing these challenges requires public resources and effective mechanisms to mobilize them fairly. For this reason, fiscal policy is no longer an exclusively economic issue but has become a central topic in discussions on human rights and sustainable development.

For many years, debates on taxation, public spending, and international tax cooperation proceeded along paths separate from discussions on human rights. Today, that separation is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Decisions about who pays taxes, how the tax burden is distributed, and how public policies are financed have direct consequences for states’ ability to guarantee rights such as health, education, housing, social security, and a healthy environment.

A new understanding of this relationship is emerging in various international forums. Human rights bodies, multilateral institutions, academics, and civil society organizations have begun to recognize that tax justice and the guarantee of rights are part of the same conversation. 

With this issue of the Newsletter, I aim to contribute to that debate by showing how the tax discussions currently taking place in international forums can have concrete effects on states. Below, I present two articles that address this relationship from complementary perspectives. 

In the first article, which I call “From Taxes to Rights,” I highlight the recent Resolution 2/26 of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on tax policies and human rights—a milestone for the region as an international instrument that comprehensively addresses the relationship between taxation and human rights. I also highlight the role that civil society organizations, such as Dejusticia, have played for years in contributing to the development of this agenda.

In the second article, I highlight one of the most important international negotiation processes of recent years: the drafting of the United Nations Model Convention on International Tax Cooperation. In particular, I focus on the discussions regarding the taxation of cross-border services. In the article “Who Should Collect Taxes When Services Cross Borders?”, I highlight how the rules for determining who has the right to tax income derived from these services should change and how this can influence the ability of countries—especially those in the Global South—to mobilize resources.

These articles stem from a line of thinking that has been developing for years within organizations such as Dejusticia, in collaboration with scholars like Rodrigo Uprimny: human rights are at stake not only in the courts but also in fiscal decisions. Although they are often presented as separate debates, the way in which states collect and distribute public resources largely determines the real possibilities for reducing inequalities and guaranteeing a dignified life for all people.