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	UN Committee Against Torture criticises Vatican handling of sex abuse by OHCHR, Guardian News & agencies   May 2014   A report released by the UN Committee Against Torture on Friday said that Vatican officials had failed to comply with an international anti-torture treaty in a number of ways.   Among other things, it said the Holy See had failed to properly report charges of sexual abuse, allowed some suspected priests to move between dioceses instead of bringing them to justice, while at the same time not paying adequate compensation to victims.   It said any alleged abusers should face immediate suspension pending investigation to reduce the risk of further abuse, and that any suspected cases should be reported to local police forces. It also called for anyone found guilty of abuse to be sacked from the priesthood.   Victims groups have welcomed the report.   "For too long, the Vatican has been able to deny and deflect attention from its role in enabling, perpetuating, and covering-up these serious crimes around the globe," the head of the US-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Barbara Blaine, said.   The United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT) urged the Catholic church to do more to punish perpetrators, help victims and place "meaningful sanctions" on clerics who fail to deal properly with credible allegations.   In observations published following a two-day hearing this month, the panel"s 10 experts rejected the Holy See"s argument that it only exercises control over the tiny Vatican City State and cannot be held accountable for the actions of Catholic priests and bishops throughout the world.   They called on the Holy See to "take effective measures" to monitor individuals under its "effective control" and to "stop and sanction" conduct that would constitute "credible allegations of violations of the UN Convention against Torture".   Before the report had even been released, the Vatican issued a statement declaring that it had not been found to be "in violation" of the convention.   But advocates of abuse victims rejected this outright, labelling the report "a historic document" that they said recognised clerical sexual abuse as a form of torture and other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment.   "They"re clearly wrong," said Pam Spees of the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, regarding the Vatican"s assertion. "This is an important recognition of the gravity of these offences that have been minimised by the church, places responsibility where it belongs – with the hierarchy in the church, not the victims – and could help open new avenues for redress."   Felice D Gaer, the CAT"s American vice-chair, told the Guardian: "Legal scholars will tell you that when we write about a concern and make a recommendation we are identifying something that is not in conformity with the requirements of the convention. We don"t use the word "violation"; others do. But it"s quite clear it"s not in conformity with the requirements of the convention."   The report was the first issued by the CAT into the Holy See, and comes after another UN panel – the Committee on the Rights of the Child – issued a scathing rebuke to the Vatican in February.   The CAT report, while critical of the church"s sex abuse record, praises it for the steps taken.   In its report, the CAT panel noted progress made by the church on the clerical sex abuse scandal, for example welcoming Pope Francis"s establishment of a commission for the protection of minors, and his statement in April that the church needed to be "even stronger" in its tackling of the problem.   The UN experts also welcomed the Vatican"s publication for the first time this month of comprehensive statistics on how many Catholic priests had been disciplined following abuse allegations. But they added that the Holy See had not provided data regarding how many abuse allegations had been reported to the civil law enforcement authorities in the relevant countries.   The CAT said it was "concerned" by reports that some church officials "resist the principle of mandatory reporting of abuse allegations to civil authorities", urging the church to prevent "credibly accused" abusers being simply transferred to other parishes and dioceses "for the purposes of avoiding proper investigation and punishment of their crimes."   Any church official who failed to handle credible allegations "with due diligence" should be punished, it added.   Citing the case of Polish archbishop Josef Wesolowski, a former papal envoy to the Dominican Republic accused of sex abuse, it said the Holy See should "if warranted … ensure such persons are criminally prosecuted or extradited for prosecution by the civil authorities" of the relevant country.   It also said it was "deeply concerned" by reports of victims being unable to obtain adequate redress or compensation for their suffering and asked the Vatican to set up an independent complaints mechanism.   In its statement, the Vatican said: "The Holy See condemns sex abuse as a serious crime and a grave violation of human dignity." It noted the criticisms within the report and said it would "give serious consideration" to its recommendations.   http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/23/un-committee-against-torture-vatican-sex-abuse-scandal
	Sustainable Development Goals merely dead letters without fiscal justice and human rights by Center for Economic and Social Rights   We are at a crossroads in defining the future of sustainable development. Over the summer, UN member states hashed out some agreement on a proposed set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets, and simultaneously devised a ‘menu of options’ for financing these universal goals. The UN Secretary General’s office is at the grind now to synthesize these proposals and many more into a workable set of recommendations for what the post-2015 sustainable development framework could and should look like.   As the post-2015 process now starts to harden and faultlines become more pronounced, experts and activists from the development, environmental and human rights communities are converging around a fairly straightforward argument. (The short list of recommended reading starts here: the UN Millennium Campaign Africa, Oxfam, Save the Children, Global Financial Integrity, Action Aid, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Christian Aid and my organization the Center for Economic and Social Rights, alongside a wide array of academics and other experts).   Unless governments agree to concrete tax and budgetary commitments which ensure robust, equitable and accountable fiscal foundations for sustainable development, the SDGs will end up merely dead letters.   Why is fiscal justice—that is, ensuring the sufficiency, equality and accountability of financing—so central to delivering sustainable development? Much more money will need to be mobilized for sustainable development—on the order of a trillion dollars a year. According to our recent findings, a range of complementary domestic and global fiscal commitments——from ending harmful corporate income tax exemptions, to boosting financial transparency to taxing illicit financial flows and carbon emissions to name just a few—can unleash at least US$1.5 trillion per year in additional, stable and predictable public funding to end poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.   Equality in the burdens and benefits of sustainable development financing within and between countries meanwhile is as important as the total amount raised. “Collecting taxes is not enough,” as the Head of the Uruguayan Tax Collection Agency recently said, “what matters is how and from whom.” Concrete post-2015 commitments to reduce economic inequality within countries through enhanced use of progressive taxation on income and wealth, while simultaneously augmenting investments in marginalized regions and amongst disadvantaged groups would provide a needed boost to reducing corrosive levels of socio-economic inequality in all countries.   Lastly, robust and truly equitable fiscal policy—as any government official or budget analyst would say—is inherently vulnerable to being undermined by politics. At the heart of many development financing challenges lie stark imbalances of (public and private) power in domestic and trans-national decision-making over how resources are raised and spent. Good intentions are not enough to push back against this potent driver of political and economic inequality. Ensuring poor and disadvantaged communities have the right to access timely, accessible and relevant fiscal information, enabling effective and meaningful participation in the design, implementation and monitoring of budget, tax and fiscal policy and ensuring effective remedy for fiscal harms is thus a third essential pre-condition for an effective sustainable development financing strategy.   The struggle for fiscal justice post-2015 will not be easy, and will need all the help it can get. So, how might existing human rights standards and accountability mechanisms help overcome some of the obstacles to ensure robust, equitable and accountable fiscal foundations for sustainable development?   First, ensuring adequate public funding for sustainable development will require a step-change in international cooperation. While some of the proposed targets (say boosting the capacity of public revenue authorities) could be acted on by states individually, the grand majority of the actions needed to ensure sufficient resources for sustainable development will require concerted action by many governments North and South. Poor countries could commit to a universal domestic resource floor of 20% tax/GDP by 2020, for example, but this would be unachievable in most cases while the finances flowing in and out of their countries remain illicit, and the countries benefitting from the current system refuse to propose collective sanctions for private and public actors refusing to cooperate cross-border tax abuses, let alone conduct spillover analyses of the impact of their tax practices on sustainable development.   Despite varied attempts to obfuscate the facts, several human rights treaties do indeed require by law that governments cooperate internationally, commensurate with their capacities, resources and influence. These legal duties—founded in the UN Charter and other key sources of international law—imply that governments must collaborate with, and not undermine, other governments’ efforts to mobilize the maximum of available resources for human rights and sustainable development. Government laws and policies which have the effect of preventing other countries from resourcing rights in equitable ways (e.g. supporting cross-border tax evasion, improper regulation of abusive private financial actors, private creditors or other business enterprises, aid or trade conditionalities, and unjustifiable constraints on deficit financing) clearly work against the achievement of human rights and sustainable development goals. In this way, human rights can help recast the basic principles of the global tax regime away from tax competition and systemic regulatory arbitrage towards international cooperation and equality before the law.   A second key obstacle to ensuring the SDGs actually deliver fiscal justice, is the resistance from some quarters to including specific fiscal policy measures and national responsibilities as targets or indicators in themselves. National ownership of sustainable development is essential for legitimate and lasting progress. Yet, tackling global fiscal challenges will be impossible without making clear who should do what, and who will be ultimately accountable if global fiscal commitments (such as on “reducing illicit financial flows by x%’) are not achieved. Without including specific needed policy efforts (on beneficial ownership of companies, trusts and foundations; automatic tax information exchange; mandatory fiscal policy spillover analyses, to name a few), the outcome-oriented targets will remain nebulous, elusive and ultimately un-delivered. Human rights standards, in this context, impose obligations of conduct as well as of result. Governments in other words are accountable not only for the outcomes they achieve but for the policy efforts they make, supporting the case that the targets and indicators used to measure sustainable development, especially on fiscal policy—should be policy-sensitive as well as outcome-oriented.   Effective fiscal accountability remains another challenge which can be more fully addressed through recourse to human rights. While on the surface it might seem that the struggle over whether or not to include SDG targets on political participation, freedom of assembly, right to information and access to justice are far afield from financing development, these fundamental human rights lay at the very foundation of fair fiscal policy. Fiscal accountability—characterized by the right to access timely, accessible and relevant fiscal information, meaningful and organized participation in the design, implementation and monitoring of fiscal policy, and the provision of effective remedies for fiscal harms–is a key determinant in strengthening tax compliance and tax morale and essential to ultimately carrying through on promised development commitments. What’s more, it is a human rights imperative. As such, an array of human rights mechanisms—from constitutional courts to national human rights commissions to UN treaty bodies—are being increasingly invoked , particularly in the context of the economic crisis and austerity. These human rights bodies have a still-untapped potential to protect peoples’ fundamental rights to transparency, information, participation and accountability in fiscal policy decisions at all levels.   Lastly, framing fiscal justice as a human rights issue takes it beyond the elite technocratic sphere into the arena of legitimate public scrutiny, debate and mobilization around fundamental values of equality, solidarity and justice. This can help not only check the near-hegemonic influence of private interests over tax policy, but also broaden the platform to a broader range of social actors not yet engaged in tax advocacy, such as budget analysts, corporate accountability campaigners, social movements, litigators and academics. Sustained alliance-building will be required in the coming years to turn human rights principles into a coherent, universal and enforceable body of fiscal policy standards, respected in practice by governments, international institutions, multinational businesses and their advisers/financiers.   Financing sustainable development adequately, equitably and accountably remains a significant challenge which the UN post-2015 agenda and next year’s Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa is well-placed to address. Far from a political lightning rod, human rights standards and mechanisms can be dynamic tools in this struggle.   * Niko Lusiani is the Director of the Human Rights in Economic Policy program at the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR). This piece was adapted from a presentation made at the event, “Human rights and tax policies in the post-2015 development agenda: Towards a transformative partnership?” on June 16th 2014 at UN Headquarters. 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