Thank you Chair,
Let me at the outset join colleagues in thanking you for your leadership and tireless efforts throughout this important process.
This endeavor towards a UN framework convention on international tax cooperation marks an historic opportunity to achieving a more inclusive and effective tax cooperation.
Admittedly, taxation is a novel issue to the UN. Finding amenable solutions will require hard work and a collective commitment to the process but also a willingness to compromise and enter into dialogue.
Norway remains committed to achieving an ambitious and impactful outcome. We must place great emphasis on the needs and priorities expressed by developing countries, in line with the sustainable development goals and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.
In order to succeed in developing an impactful and universally acceptable outcome, the process must be inclusive, transparent and based on analysis. We therefore continue to stress the need to make every effort to achieving consensus, to ensure the broadest possible participation in the framework convention and its protocols.
As a Member of the Bureau and through constructive participation in this Committee, Norway has actively proposed input with a view to achieving common ground.
We welcome that several of our suggested proposals for early protocols are reflected in the final draft, such as environmental taxation and high-net worth individuals. It is also vital for us that there is a reference to human rights, although we maintain that this should have been strengthened. The linkages between global taxation and human rights are undisputable.
Norway has invested a lot in the existing global tax cooperation both in the UN, the OECD, and as a guest country to the G20, and In the Inclusive Framework and Global Forum. We remain committed to these ongoing processes.
We continue to stress that it remains essential that international tax cooperation at the UN should seek to build synergies with existing mechanisms and processes, in a way that mutually reinforces each other’s comparative strengths.
Norway is therefore disappointed that our suggestions to strengthen coordination with existing processes are not adequately reflected in the text, and that duplicitous proposals have been given prominence.
For this reason, Norway has abstained.
We, however, remain fully committed to our collective objective of agreeing to a global convention on international taxation cooperation.