(Seville) – The United Nations conference on financing for development should help pave the way for meaningful progress on improving international tax cooperation to benefit everyone’s human rights, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch issued a database on tax references made by UN treaty bodies.
The fourth international meeting in development financing will begin on June 30, 2025, in Seville, Spain. The conference will bring together governments, international and regional organizations, civil society, financial and trade institutions, and businesses to agree on key reforms for financing at all levels, including global systemic barriers to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
“Current flaws in tax systems and tax cooperation deprive governments of billions of dollars in revenue and undermine their capacity to deliver on their human rights obligations, such as to health and education, as well as to development,” said Lama Fakih, acting deputy executive director at Human Rights Watch. “The Financing for Development Conference in Seville is a chance for the international community to commit to meaningful change, including by supporting ongoing negotiations for a UN tax treaty.”
Ahead of the conference, on June 27, civil society organizations, including Human Rights Watch, will hold a day-long conference highlighting the links between taxation, public services, and development. Governments have already agreed to a draft outcome document for the Seville Conference. After the United States withdrew from negotiations, the agreement was adopted by consensus across the remaining 192 countries.
The conference is an opportunity to mobilize support for a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, which governments will be negotiating until 2027. The treaty process was initiated in 2022 by African countries, which face particularly consequential losses under the current tax system yet lack fair representation in international economic decision-making.
Even though countries have already agreed on an outcome document for the Seville conference, it will be a critical opportunity to discuss how to carry out these commitments. It will also be important to collectively address economic issues, including their human rights dimensions, amid global instability.
Equitable global tax rules are key to supporting “human rights economies” that align domestic and international economic decision-making with the realization of human rights. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) obliges its 172 states parties to use maximum available resources, including through international cooperation, to fulfill economic, social, and cultural rights, such as health, education, and social security.
Tax cooperation is critical to realizing those and other human rights obligations, by making it possible for governments to raise revenues to fund these rights and by reducing inequality within and between countries.
Several of the UN committees charged with assessing states’ compliance with human rights treaties have consistently urged states to align their tax systems with their human rights obligations, particularly those charged with interpreting and monitoring state compliance with the ICESCR and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
These committees have emphasized the importance of improving international cooperation and ensuring that their tax rules do not undermine other governments’ ability to meet their human rights obligations. Others have focused on more specific human rights dimensions of taxation, including how particular tax policies can either reinforce or effectively combat harmful patterns of discrimination within societies.
The Human Rights Watch database includes every reference to taxes made by these treaty bodies in their periodic assessments of states’ human rights performance since 2007. It categorizes them according to key themes, such as nondiscrimination, adequacy of available resources, and progressive taxation. Human Rights Watch found that since 2007, seven treaty bodies included some discussion of tax in 168 reviews of 98 states’ compliance with their human rights obligations.
Many governments face significant constraints raising revenues they need to improve the protection or progressive realization of human rights under existing international tax rules and practices, and many are also saddled with high debt servicing costs. This is a key driver of persistent human rights problems that deprive millions of people of critical health services or quality education.
Recent Human Rights Watch analyses of health spending globally and education spending in Africa, including in Egypt, show that most governments are failing to meet minimum spending on public services in order to realize rights, leading to high rates of school dropout and worsening employment conditions for public health workers and teachers.
Human Rights Watch research also documents that emerging labour models, such as platform or “gig” work, allow companies to avoid tax and social security contributions, undermining funding for public services and social protection while building billion-dollar industries.
While many Global North countries opposed efforts led by Global South countries for a commitment on a binding instrument to address debt, the agreed text for the conference includes several positive commitments for international tax cooperation.
These include a commitment “to engage constructively in the negotiations on a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation” and an assertion that “governments will make sure that multinational companies are taxed “where economic activity occurs.” The ability of multinational companies to shift profits to tax havens is a major source of revenue loss for governments. The draft outcome document also includes specific commitments for transparency and exchange of information critical to stemming tax abuse and avoidance.
“A strong and unified commitment to tax justice could finally help turn the tide on an international system that has faltered,” Fakih said. “Billions of people are suffering the consequences of severely underfunded public services, even as the wealth of the richest continues to soar.”