Ms Jennifer Higgins:

I joined the Deputy on the excellent symposium on business and human rights. The business and human rights national action plan was released last year after a very long process. There was much critique by civil society and others regarding the policy objectives set out in it, to the effect that it was not ambitious enough or highlighting some of the more pertinent issues around business and human rights emerging globally. It is definitely not strong enough on specific policy and actions. We are not seeing a link between tax and human rights. We are working towards developing a tax and human rights policy position ourselves that it is hoped will bring together these two specific areas. Unfortunately, they have not been merged much and we have not seen them in the business and human rights model. In addition, there is a type of confusion between corporate social responsibility and business and human rights. As the Deputy said, we must highlight the business and human rights model more with businesses, but sometimes we see a confusion with corporate social responsibility as being enough.

It is important to highlight that action plan. When submissions were requested for the drafting of the business and human rights action plan, we made a submission and we would have highlighted tax as part of that. Obviously, we were disappointed not to have seen it. The drafting was housed in the same Department as Irish Aid, and Irish Aid has recognised the importance of tax for developing countries gaining enough revenue to develop their own services for the fulfilment of human rights. It is unfortunate we have not seen that reflected in other plans within the same Department. It goes back to policy coherence, as we mentioned. There will be a further drawing out of human rights and tax in the future. The Center for Economic and Social Rights, CESR, under the Switzerland review under the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, criticised Switzerland because its tax policies do not allow developing countries to provide full services for women. It found that its tax practices contravened its obligations under the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW. This is something we hope to draw out further in the future, to look at how our human rights obligations interact with our tax practices.