Dissertation
The Interpretation of Plurilingual Tax Treaties
On 10 October 2018, Richard Resch defended his doctoral thesis 'The Interpretation of Plurilingual Tax Treaties'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. mr. C. van Raad.
- Author
- Richard Resch
- Date
- 10 October 2018
- Links
- Leiden Repository
The current orthodoxy maintains courts are not required to compare all language texts of a plurilingual tax treaty but may rely on a single one for cases of 'routine interpretation'. As is shown by this study, this widely held view is fundamentally flawed, in violation of the rules codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and the source of treaty misapplication; taxpayers are ill-advised to pay attention only to the text in their own language.
This study seeks to provide conclusive arguments and useful data to policy makers, treaty negotiators, judges, practitioners, and other scholars. Its extensive analysis of clauses in 3,844 tax treaties governing which texts are authentic and prevail in case of divergence is intended to help both taxpayers and courts interpreting and applying tax treaties in concrete situations.