CESR, along with Tax Justice Network, ESCR-Net, Movement Law Lab, and other allies, recently made a submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) for its review of the UK. In our submission, we highlighted the prominent role played by the UK in facilitating international tax abuse through its “second empire” of overseas territories and crown dependencies. The UK is responsible for as much as 27% of the $311 billion lost to corporate tax abuse yearly. This loss of revenue undermines the fiscal capacity of countries in the Global South for resource rights like education, healthcare, and social security.
The piece connects the dots between racial justice and tax justice by highlighting the historical link between the UK’s role in slavery and colonialism and the present-day phenomenon of tax havens, which disproportionately impact the non-white nations of the global South. The unjust international financial architecture that facilitates the extraction of wealth from the South to the North is, therefore, a contemporary structure of historic racial injustice mainly unaccounted for today. We stressed that OECD member states like the UK have extraterritorial obligations which require the regulation of their corporations and citizens where their conduct negatively impacts the achievement of racial equality both within and between nations. The submission also connected the dots between the climate crisis, debt crisis, and international tax abuse and how all three are racial justice issues requiring urgent intervention.
On August 12, 2024, we made a video statement to the CERD emphasizing why, with the negotiations for a United Nations Convention on International Tax Cooperation underway and the UK being a prominent member of the OECD, now is the time to denounce its tax policies and acknowledge that tax justice is a racial justice issue requiring urgent intervention.
Disappointingly, the CERD released its Concluding Observations but did not mention the impact of UK tax policies on racial equality.
CESR, Tax Justice Network, and its allies will continue to ramp up the pressure on the UK and other OECD member states to do the right thing: put their full support behind the UNTC. This pressure is especially needed considering the UK was one of eight countries that voted against the Terms of Reference on the UNTC in August.
