Georg Kofler, Miguel Poiares Maduro and Pasquale Pistone (eds), Human Rights and Taxation in Europe and the World (IBFD, Amsterdam, 2011, xxiii+ 549 pp.,€ 120) ISBN 978-90-8722 ...

The subject matter of this book is intriguing, complex and a mystery to human
rights lawyers. One need only undertake a very fast and random search on any
of the most popular internet book sellers to realise not only that no other book
exists in the field, but also that even the book under review is absent from the
list! There are two obvious reasons for this lack of scholarship. The first is that
few, if any, human rights scholars possess a good enough understanding of tax
and tax law to make the necessary inroads. Secondly, tax lawyers themselves,
even if they did possess a good grasp of the ever-expanding field of human
rights, would be disinclined or disinterested to apply a rights perspective to a
strictly commercial venture that is dictated by numbers and the interests of
largely corporate clients. This explains to a large degree the lack of systemic
congruence between the two legal disciplines. The divide is clearly an artificial
one based on the absence of communication (including mutuality of lan-
guage) between the two disciplines.