Employees and customers everywhere care about respect for people and the planet by OHCHR, Independent Experts on Global Inequality   28 Nov. 2025   UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk at 14th United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights:   "The issues you will discuss over the next three days are central to our global economic system and its impact on people and planet. They are also about power - power that has evolved drastically over recent years.   When the international human rights system was established, human rights work was focused on the responsibility of Governments to protect people’s rights. Since then, corporate power has grown significantly, based largely on the accumulation of personal and corporate wealth among a handful of players. In some cases, this exceeds the economies of entire countries. And we know that if power is not constrained by law, it can lead to abuse and subjugation.   The current business model of social media platforms is already fuelling polarization, extremism, and exclusion. Many countries are struggling to address this phenomenon.   When powerful tech giants introduce new technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence, human rights can be the first casualty.   Generative AI holds significant promise, but its exploitation for purely political or economic benefit can manipulate, distort, and distract. The threats to several human rights, including privacy, political participation, free expression and work are clear and present.   Without proper safeguards and regulations, AI systems have the potential to turn into a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster.   Today’s threats could materialize into harms that undermine the promise of emerging technologies and could unleash unpredictable consequences.   Governments have a responsibility to come together to prevent such an outcome. And companies can choose a different path. They can seize the opportunity to build digital technologies that advance human rights and serve the public good.   Corporate power imbalances also play out in the climate emergency. The meagre results of COP30 in Belem illustrate this point. The fossil fuel industry is generating massive profits while devastating some of the poorest communities and countries in the world. There needs to be proper accountability for this injustice, and for all other harms related to climate chaos.   I often wonder how future generations will judge our leaders’ actions — and their fatal inaction — on the climate crisis. In fifty or one hundred years from now, could their inadequate response be considered ecocide, or even a crime against humanity?   Meanwhile, the continued abuse and mistreatment of workers across several sectors are also deepening inequalities. Migrant workers, women, and those working in the informal economy are among the worst affected.   I am concerned about ongoing attacks against the courageous human rights defenders who shine a light on business-related abuses. This is unacceptable.   There are also worrying rollbacks in law and policy. States in some regions are watering down laws requiring corporate respect for human rights, which could have ripple effects around the world.   Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, which were adopted to address historic and structural discrimination, are under attack in some regions. This is a very troubling development; we cannot return to systems that run contrary to equality and justice.   To counter these trends, we need to tackle today’s challenges head-on.   Some companies are aligning human rights risk management with international standards, even as some regulations are being diluted. Some of you here today are committing to the renewable energy shift, helping drive record growth in capacity last year.   Other businesses are doing more to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples in energy and infrastructure projects. Some are creating formal mechanisms to address the human rights impact of their operations. Some investment firms are aligning their strategies and decisions with human rights and are pivoting to green energy and sustainable infrastructure.   These are important steps that reflect what your employees and customers everywhere care about: respect for people and planet.   Courts have pronounced clearly that corporations have obligations to respect human rights. This doctrine needs to evolve further into clearly articulated legal obligations at the international level.   The International Court of Justice found that Governments need to prevent significant harm to our climate, including by regulating businesses. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights also recognized the right to a stable climate and called on States to enforce corporate due diligence and provide remedies for climate-related harm.   Earlier this year, courts in Brazil and the United Kingdom found that companies could be liable for abuses from slave-like labour practices, to oil pollution, to atrocities committed in third countries, respectively.   The value and importance of corporate compliance with human rights is beyond doubt. Businesses benefit from justice. They benefit from sound, stable institutions, from the rule of law, and from sustainable economies.   The cost of human rights abuses for businesses is high. Lawsuits can result in long delays. Protests and boycotts can have tremendous sway over corporate behaviour. They have already caused billions in financial damage to several multinational companies in recent years. There is also considerable evidence that employees prefer to work for companies that are perceived as ethical. Employee power is real.   This is a difficult moment for human rights, and it calls for unity and solidarity. We need a Global Alliance for human rights – a cross-regional coalition of States, businesses, civil society and others – to put human rights at the heart of public and political life.   We all have a role to play in addressing our world’s deepest challenges – not only as representatives of Governments, business, and civil society, but as global citizens. Human rights are about – and for – all of us. Together, let’s ensure that human rights guide decisions that will determine the course of humanity for generations to come".   Aug. 2025   G20 President South Africa launches independent G20 expert committee to focus on extreme wealth inequality.   The G20 Presidency of South Africa has established a “Committee of Independent Experts” chaired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz – to deliver the first ever-report on global inequality to G20 to world leaders.   The Committee is launched amid fears that global wealth and income inequality, which was already very high, is set to sharply accelerate.   Recent analysis shows that the world’s richest 1 percent have increased their wealth by more than US$33.9 trillion in real terms since 2015 – more than enough to eliminate annual global poverty 22 times over. Inequality of this scale poses a serious systemic risk to global economic, social and political progress.   The President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa:   “People across the world know how extreme inequality undermines their dignity and chance for a better future. They saw the brutal unfairness of vaccine apartheid, where millions in the Global South were denied the vaccines to save them.   They see the impacts of rising food and energy prices, of debt, of trade wars, all driving this growing gap between the rich and the rest of the world, undermining progress and economic dynamism. A new oligarchy in our global economy is becoming apparent.   “South Africa’s G20 Presidency is proud to launch an initiative that will target this issue of global wealth inequality – a first for the G20 – and offer practical ways going forward. We are honored to host a group of the world’s most respected economic experts, led by Professor Stiglitz, to produce a report that will be being presented to G20 Leaders.   Professor Joseph Stiglitz (USA), Nobel Economics Prize Laureate:   “Inequality has widened to extremes that threaten democracy itself and should be a concern of all of us; the profound rise in the discontent over mismanaged globalisation which in many places has contributed to this growth of inequality is also evident. Inequality was always a choice – and G20 nations have the power to choose a different path, on a range of economic and social policies".   “The wealth of scholarship on the causes of, and ways of reducing, inequality, can help us to redress the great divide that has grown enormously in recent years. Our task must now be to translate the evidence and public’s palpable anger at the great divide into sound, practical and transformative policy proposals.   * Dec. 2025: G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality final Report: http://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202511/g20-global-inequality-report-full-and-summary.pdf   * Joint Civil Society call urging President Ramaphosa to Confront Extreme Inequality at the G20: http://gi-escr.org/en/our-work/on-the-ground/joint-letter-urging-president-ramaphosa-to-confront-extreme-inequality-at-the-g20 http://gcap.global/news/gcap-and-global-south-civil-society-urge-g20-to-draw-a-red-line-on-billionaire-era-demand-action-on-debt-and-tax-justice/   July 2025   A Tax Victory for Multinationals Over People, by Joseph E. Stiglitz , José Antonio Ocampo, and Jayati Ghosh for the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation. (Project Syndicate)   Once again, G7 governments have decided to put the interests of multinationals ahead of the interests of developing countries, small and medium-size businesses, and their own citizens, this time by exempting US multinationals from the global minimum corporate tax agreed in 2021. The US must not be allowed to dictate global policy.   The US Treasury just made a deal with the other G7 countries that global minimum taxes that were already agreed upon will not apply to American companies. The G7 governments caved under intense pressure from President Donald Trump and lobbying from multinationals in Washington, London, Brussels, and beyond – just as India, and now, sadly, Canada have caved on digital taxation.   Years ago, the international community recognized that too many global companies were not paying their fair share of taxes, and some weren’t paying taxes to the country where the economic activity actually occurs. The complex agreement that emerged in 2021 at the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting comprised two pillars; only Pillar Two, a global minimum corporate tax, has been adopted. (The other pillar allocated taxation rights among countries and spurred opposition from both developing countries and the US.)   While there has been a global consensus on the need for such a minimum, the version the United States adopted during Trump’s first presidential term was different, and weaker, than that of the rest of the world, allowing multinationals to “make up” for what they didn’t pay in tax havens with the “extra” they paid in the US or other high-tax jurisdictions. While far from perfect, Pillar Two was a first attempt to ensure a minimum tax rate of 15% on the profits of multinationals everywhere, a crucial step to end harmful tax competition between countries.   There were, of course, some carve-outs and exemptions, which lowered the effective rate somewhat below 15%. And the 15% rate was already lower than the rate imposed by many developing countries; it should have been higher, and the carve-outs smaller. Still, the Pillar Two deal halted the race to the bottom, whereby countries offered lower tax rates to attract businesses to their jurisdictions. For the world as a whole, this race didn’t generate much new investment; the real winners were the rich corporations who pocketed the savings from paying almost no taxes at all in some countries.   But once again, G7 governments have decided to put multinationals’ interests ahead of the interests of developing countries, small and medium-size businesses (which can’t avail themselves of the shenanigans that multinationals have found so profitable), and their own citizens – who, as a consequence, will pay higher taxes.   By exempting US multinationals from Pillar Two, this deal will allow some to continue to benefit from zero or near-zero taxes on profits they book in low-tax jurisdictions or tax havens such as Puerto Rico and the Cayman Islands. This will make them more competitive than non-US multinationals.   Because modern multinational corporations are willing to move their nominal headquarters to wherever they get the most favorable tax treatment (and other goodies), with the real economic activity occurring elsewhere, giving US companies preferential treatment incentivizes companies to move their official headquarters to the US. This is another sad example of a race to the bottom.   By acceding to US demands, the G7 deal risks undermining the worldwide implementation of the minimum tax. It also makes a mockery of the inclusiveness of the so-called OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework.   There was a pretense that the new global framework was crafted by more than 140 countries working together. To be sure, many developing countries complained this was an unfair agreement for them and that powerful countries did not listen to their concerns. Now that façade has crumbled. The non-G7 countries, including dozens of emerging markets and developing countries, are now being asked to rubber-stamp a decision imposed on them by just one country.   Pillar Two should be strengthened, not gutted. It currently applies only to large multinationals (with a global turnover at or above €750 million), and the global minimum tax rate of 15% is set very low. The Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation has always advocated a minimum rate of at least 25%.   According to some estimates, Pillar Two’s minimum tax would have yielded between $155 and $192 billion annually in additional global corporate income tax revenue. While this is a significant amount, a minimum rate of 25% could generate more than $500 billion a year in additional revenue. In a world facing converging crises of inequality, climate change, and underfunded public services, leaving such substantial resources on the table is fiscally irresponsible and morally indefensible.   Pillar Two represented a starting point – a global floor on corporate taxation that could have curbed the race to the bottom and restored some degree of tax justice. The G7’s decision to let US multinationals off the hook weakens even that modest floor and sends the wrong message to the rest of the world.   Just two weeks ago at the United Nations, there was a global consensus about the need to strengthen international tax cooperation and to implement progressive tax systems, and a large majority of countries voted for and support ongoing negotiations toward a UN framework convention on international tax cooperation.   But the US government recently walked away from the UN negotiations, stating that the goals of the proposed UN convention “are inconsistent with US priorities and represent an unwelcome overreach.” In the adoption of the “Compromiso de Sevilla,” the outcome document of this week’s UN Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), the US was the only major country that was absent.   Allowing the US to bypass the already modest Pillar Two rules not only undermines multilateralism; it also flies in the face of the commitments that have been made, and further deepens the inequity in global tax governance.   The members of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework should reject the deal made at the G7. The US must not be allowed to dictate global policy. It is powerful, but still represents less than 20% of global GDP. Countries meeting in Seville for FfD4 can either accept the US undermining every effort to ensure multinationals pay their fair share, or redouble efforts to create a new international tax system at the UN that works for all. For the sake of the world economy and people everywhere, they should do the latter.   * Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics is a University Professor at Columbia University, and Co-Chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation. Jose Antonio Ocampo, a former United Nations under-secretary-general is a professor at Columbia University, and a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation; Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is Co-Chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation.   http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/g7-caved-to-us-on-global-minimum-corporate-tax-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-et-al-2025-06 http://www.icrict.com/corporate-taxation/countries-must-stand-up-against-trump-bullying/ http://www.icrict.com/corporate-taxation/the-compromiso-de-sevilla-a-hope-for-tax-justice-now-governments-must-deliver/ http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/02/fair-and-effective-tax-policies-needed-advance-economic-social-and-cultural Visit the related web page
	Control the platforms on which modern economies run, and you control the economies themselves by Rafal Rohozinski SecDev Flashnotes Canada   Nov. 2025   The headlines focused on what they always focus on: the rhetoric about immigrants, the dismissiveness toward European allies, the muscular nationalism that plays well in certain domestic constituencies. But while pundits dissected the predictable provocations of the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy, the document’s most consequential passages slipped past largely unnoticed. The real revolution is buried in the fine print. It concerns not borders or battalions, but bytes and bandwidth.   What the NSS articulates, with remarkable candour for a strategic document, is a fundamental reimagining of the global order. Not the reimagining that critics expected, a retreat from international engagement, but something far more ambitious: the explicit subordination of allied sovereignty to American digital dominance. The document announces what might be called a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, positioning the Western Hemisphere as a zone of exclusive American economic and strategic influence. The United States will, it declares, “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”   Read that carefully. “Strategically vital assets” in 2025 no longer means military bases or shipping lanes. It means cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, and the digital arteries through which modern economies flow. The language is aimed primarily at China, but its logic applies universally, extending to any power, including European allies, that might challenge American technological preeminence in Washington’s backyard.   “The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies.”   That sentence, buried in the strategy’s economic provisions, deserves to be read and reread. It is perhaps the most honest articulation of American strategic thinking in decades. Countries within the American sphere (and Canada sits at the very centre of that sphere) are expected not merely to cooperate with American firms but to preference them exclusively. The document pairs this expectation with an instruction to “make every effort to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region,” extending explicitly to “cyber communications networks” and technology infrastructure.   Here is where the document’s internal contradictions become not merely philosophical but practically consequential. The NSS premises its entire strategic logic on the primacy of national sovereignty. Nations, it insists, must “put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.”   This is the animating principle behind every critique of multilateral institutions, every withdrawal from international agreements, every insistence that America will no longer subordinate its interests to global consensus.   Yet the same document that celebrates sovereignty as the foundational principle of international order proceeds to systematically circumscribe the sovereignty of America’s closest allies. The Hemisphere is defined as an American zone of prerogative. Technology procurement is expected to favour American vendors.   Partnership benefits become “contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence,” language elastic enough to encompass European technology partnerships, Asian supply chains, or any collaboration that might dilute American market dominance.   This is not hypocrisy in the conventional sense. It is something more coherent and more troubling: a worldview in which sovereignty exists in concentric circles, with American sovereignty absolute and allied sovereignty conditional.   The United States reserves for itself the right to determine which external influences are “adversarial” and which partnerships are permissible. Sovereignty, in this framework, is not a universal principle but a privilege that flows downward from Washington.   For countries like Canada, the implications are stark. Between 64 and 70 percent of Canadian internet traffic already routes through American territory. All thirteen trans-Pacific fibre-optic cables land on the American west coast; none terminate in Canada. Over 61 percent of Canadian businesses store critical data on American cloud services.   The digital economy that increasingly defines Canadian prosperity runs on infrastructure neither owned nor controlled domestically. The NSS transforms this dependency from an inconvenience into a lever, a mechanism of influence more effective than any tariff.   But the Canadian case merely illustrates a global dynamic. We are entering a zero-sum world where allies and partners are transient and transactional, where relationships are measured not in shared values but in commercial advantage.   The concentration of power within the emerging global digital economy, particularly its commanding heights in AI and cloud infrastructure, means that technological dependency translates directly into political subordination. Control the platforms on which modern economies run, and you control the economies themselves.   This is, in many ways, more consequential than the NSS’s more inflammatory provisions. The disparagement of immigrants will generate outrage and resistance. European leaders will bristle at their diminished status and find ways to push back. These are visible conflicts that will play out in diplomatic exchanges and newspaper editorials. But the quiet restructuring of digital dependency, the transformation of technological dominance into instruments of statecraft, operates below the threshold of public attention. It reshapes the architecture of power while everyone argues about the furniture.   The question this strategy forces upon America’s allies is not whether to resist American influence (that ship has largely sailed) but whether to accept a future in which sovereignty becomes a formality, a flag to be waved while decisions of consequence are made elsewhere. For countries that have built their prosperity on American-controlled digital infrastructure, the choice may already be constrained.   For those with time and foresight to act, the NSS should serve as a clarifying document: a roadmap of the future Washington envisions, and a warning about the costs of dependency in an age when data is power and platforms are territory. It is always important to read the fine print. In this case, the fine print is not merely important. It is the strategy itself. Everything else is theatre.   * Rafal Rohozinski is the CEO of the Secdev Group, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and co-chair of the Canadian AI Sovereignty and Innovation Cluster.
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