The “Tax Justice Together” Campaigners’ Conference in Warsaw, Poland is part of the Tax Justice Together project of Action Aid and Oxfam, aimed primarily at “putting tax justice at the heart of the European agenda.”
TAFJA (through Mae Buenaventura of APMDD and Rakesh Mittal of INSAF) participated in the “Tax Justice Together” Campaigners’ Conference last 22-23 November in Warsaw, Poland. The conference is part of the Tax Justice Together project of Action Aid and Oxfam, aimed primarily at “putting tax justice at the heart of the European agenda”. We were invited as a regional alliance together with other representatives of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ) to contribute to the following objectives of the project:
Overall objective: to boost our creativity, look forward and plan what we need to do as a global movement to achieve tax justice
Specific objectives:
- To understand the policy landscape; including political hooks and the politics of decision-making that are relevant for us as a global movement
- To inspire and open up creative thinking by sharing best practice, successful and non-successful experiences in campaigning and influencing for tax justice, highlighting experiences from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Western Europe, and the Global South
- To strengthen the global movement via skill-sharing on various campaigning strategies
- To plan as a global movement, by answering the questions ‘how can we work together best?’ and ‘What can we do together next?’
The conference was designed around breakout groups on the policy landscape, on policy advocacy and campaigning experiences and networking/alliance building. We contributed to these workshops by sharing our tax justice issues and methodologies. We also joined a short panel allotted to share about the work of GATJ and its regional network-members, and reach out to the participants (and through them, their regional partners) to be part of GATJ’s respective networks and working groups on various tax justice concerns. Our resource materials (issue briefs) on tax justice in relation to extractives, tax treaties, trade and investments, gender and illicit financial flows were distributed among the participants.
The Tax Justice Together Project is led by ActionAid UK and it is coordinated by a Central Team based in AAUK, Oxfam GB (UK), Glopolis (Czech Republic) and Oxfam Intermon (Spain). It will end in March 2017.
There were over 70 participants, largely from Europe-based Action Aid and Oxfam offices.