Includes bibliographical references and index.

Overview of tax havens and international finance centres -- Offshore structures : accountability avoidance -- Beneficial ownership avoidance -- Tax avoidance and tax evasion -- The Isle of Man and the international human rights continuum -- Switzerland : illicit financial flows, women's rights and gender equality -- Concluding recommendations.

This book sails in uncharted waters. It takes a human rights-based approach to tax havens, and is a detailed analysis of structures and the laws that generate and support these. It makes plain the unscrupulous or merely indifferent ways in which, using tax havens, businesses and individuals systematically undermine and for all practical purposes eliminate access to remedies under international human rights law. It exposes as abusive of human rights a complex structural web of trusts, companies, partnerships, foundations, nominees and fiduciaries; secrecy, immunity and smoke screens. It also lays bare the cynical manipulation by tax havens of traditional legal forms and conventions, and the creation of entities so bizarre and chimeric that they defy classification. Yet from the perspective of the tax havens themselves, these are entirely legitimate; the product of duly enacted domestic laws.