Topic: Budget and Rights

What makes up a country’s budget? And what is it for? A budget can guarantee rights or violate them. We have developed a methodology to analyze the public budget for the defense and promotion of human rights. It is the Budget & Rights Methodology (2018).

(click on the images and download our methodology in Portuguese)

In it, five points are fundamental to promote full citizenship:

1. State funding aligned with social justice. That is to say, whoever earns the most, pays the most.
2. The maximum application of the resources available. The majority of public spending must go to social, environmental, and climate-related investments – not debt repayment.
3. The progressive realization of human rights, with no one’s rights prioritized or respected beneath another.
4. Anti-discrimination and promotion of equality and equity, especially of women, LGBT+, black, traditional populations, and indigenous peoples.
5. Social participation.

The monitoring and decoding process of the budget, and the permanent search for greater transparency of public expenditures are goals of INESC, which cover all the topics with which we work.

We act by reconfiguring the tax system to meet social, environmental, and climatic demands and guarantee the financing of public policies. We work with others to expose the unfairness of the current tax burden, not because of its size, but because of its unequal distribution, which imposes the urgent need for a just and democratic reform.