PROMOTING INCLUSIVE AND EFFECTIVE TAX COOPERATION AT THE UN

ECOSOC Special Meeting on International Cooperation in Tax Matters 18th March 2024 PROMOTING INCLUSIVE AND EFFECTIVE TAX COOPERATION AT THE UN Excellencies, The South Centre, an intergovernmental think tank of developing countries with 55 Member States from Asia, Africa and Latin America, congratulates the Chair and Members of the Bureau on their appointment to the all-important ad hoc committee t. [...] The Ad Hoc Committee has a genuinely historic mandate as it has to design the architecture of the long-standing demand of the developing world for a UN Tax Body. [...] Thus, the core requirement of the UN Tax Convention should be to solve the governance problem in the existing international system and create a genuinely inclusive rules-based architecture which can facilitate multilateral agreements on current and future international tax issues on the basis of fairness, equity, transparency, democracy and inclusiveness and bring coherence and efficiency to the i. [...] The core idea should be to create a strong Conference of Parties (COP) able to perform any function it deems necessary, especially setting the agenda and having the power to decide through democratic voting whether the outputs produced are satisfactory or not. [...] Membership to the COP should be restricted to sovereign countries and tax haven jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and others which are not independent countries should be disallowed from Membership, in keeping with the UN principles of sovereign equality and one country one vote.