In alliance with the Initiative for Human Rights in Fiscal Policy, ACIJ, CELS, Dejusticia, the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), and Fundar, we echoed the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights's call to provide input to the comprehensive thematic study on the human rights dimension of care and support.

Highlighting the links between fiscal policies and care, the contribution focused on the importance of these instruments in promoting and guaranteeing the human rights of care providers and care receivers. By addressing the allocation of resources to recognise, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work, equitable taxation, and the measurement of care work and its contribution to national accounts, the document highlights the importance of financial resources to guarantee rights in practice fully. 

As such, the report focuses on how fiscal policy can contribute to ensuring the right to care through national budgeting processes, including a human rights and gender perspective that enables allocating resources to reduce and redistribute unpaid care work and ensure equitable tax collection. The presentation also proposed concrete measures to overcome the current situation, such as providing public care services and community care infrastructure, and revenue-raising provisions to eliminate tax loopholes and regressive tax measures.

The thematic study, commissioned by the Human Rights Council through Resolution 54/6, seeks to assess the human rights dimension of care and support, summarising and compiling international standards, good practices, and the main challenges at the national level in care and support systems. It will include recommendations on promoting and ensuring the human rights of caregivers and care and support recipients.

Our contribution, developed as part of our strategic priority to reinforce the capacity of international institutional frameworks to tackle social and economic injustice effectively, also furthers our advocacy efforts to mainstream the progressive fiscal policies perspective among the United Nations and beyond.

You can read the full text of the submission here (in Spanish only):