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The overall aim of this article is to analyse the principal purpose test as an emerging rule of customary international tax law. By means of the principal purpose test, the tax administration can deny the tax treaty benefit if one of the principal purposes of the action undertaken by the taxpayer was to obtain a benefit. This principal purpose test has been developed by the OECD with the political support of the G20 as one of the actions to tackle Base Erosion and Profit Shifting by multinationals (BEPS Project). At the time of writing, 137 jurisdictions including non-OECD, non-G-20 countries have committed to the implementation of the principal purpose test in their current and future tax treaties. Based on the analysis of the objective element (state practice) and subjective element (accepted as law), there are indications that this principal purpose test can emerge as a principle of customary international law. In the past, international tax law scholars addressed the customary international law regarding the OECD/UN tax treaty Models, the OECD Harmful Tax Practices, and the arm’s length principle. However, current international tax developments, including the BEPS Project, call for an analysis of the main elements of customary international law in respect of the principal purpose test, a general anti-avoidance rule that by its own nature, is often general, vague, and imprecise. Therefore, the findings of this article can be useful for generating new areas of research by international public law, international law, and international tax law experts.

In their discussions on corporate income tax systems the International Organizations (IOs) OECD, UN, IMF and World Bank, Supranational Organizations (SOs), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), associations of practitioners and Governments often refer to the concept of fairness without proper definition of what in the context of their arguments is fairness and how the fairness can be achieved. The consequence is that fairness in taxation is a blurred concept. This article shows that fairness in taxation has an economical, juridical, philosophical and political perspective. Following the overview of these perspectives, this article calls for more research on global perceptions of fairness and for formulating an agenda for discussing this issue by IOs, SOs, NGOs and Governments.

The overall aim of this article is to analyse the taxpayers’ rights to confidentiality and privacy in exchange of information including the new global standard of automatic exchange of information. Section 2 will analyse the state of the art regarding the right to privacy and confidentiality in the OECD bilateral and multilateral instruments, in the Human Right Conventions and in case law by the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice. This section will also analyse the application of the right to privacy and confidentiality in practice mainly by identifying the problems of confidentiality and privacy arising in the disclosure of information, the exchange of trade secrets and the leak of information to the press and third parties. Subsequently, the authors explore the possibility to introduce a multilateral instrument to remedy these shortcomings.

Direct taxation in the EU is like a Darrieus Turbine, relatively good efficiency, but it shows poor reliability, as it depends on external power to start, and it tends to be fatigue-prone due to the wide variation in applied forces during each rotation. 1