Near the top of every politician’s playbook these days lies the resource scarcity card. “Economic and social rights are a morally compelling aspiration, sure, but we just don’t have the funds,” goes the commonly used but rarely-proven refrain from governments, rich and poor alike.
We can no longer afford to stay silent about tax abuse. For a while, too many human rights advocates were left struggling for satisfactory responses to this apparent trump card, deferring to the economic powers-that-be to freely determine how public monies would be raised. There were critical voices within the human rights community that sought to question how governments raise resources. Yet they were brushed aside by many of their peers as too naïve, too loose with the unimpeachable standards of human rights law, or simply too ‘ideological’. Ministries of finance remained in effect human rights-free zones, left unchecked by human rights bodies within government and civil society alike. As a result, the realization of human rights of all types—from education to access to justice, health to freedom of expression, occupational safety to social protection—remain underfunded. What’s more, by avoiding debates on raising public revenue, human rights advocates inadvertently neglected a central plank of the state-citizen accountability relationship, and thus overlooked one of the most fundamental ways through which power is mediated.
The real naivety was to think human rights could be realized without considering the material means of doing so. That approach has come to a sharp end, as a perfect storm of climate change, fiscal austerity and economic inequality is exposing the shallow foundations of the old assumptions. Today, we can no longer afford to stay silent about tax abuse.
