The Effect of Directives Within the Area of Direct Taxation on the Interpretation and Application of Tax Treaties

The Effect of Directives Within the Area of Direct Taxation on the Interpretation and Application of Tax Treaties is a first-of-its-kind book that brings a combined public international law and European Union law perspective to bear on certain directives – primarily the Parent-Subsidiary Directive, the Merger Directive, the Interest and Royalty Directive, and the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directives – and their interaction with tax treaties concluded by EU Member States. In this book, the author examines the effect of directives on both the interpretation and application of tax treaties in depth.



What’s in this book:

Shedding light on how directives can affect, or are allowed to affect, tax treaties, the book contains detailed analyses of the following aspects:

status of directives under public international law;
whether national law aimed at implementing a directive may be able to override a tax treaty or may be overridden by such a tax treaty;
whether the lex posterior and lex specialis conflict rules under public international law are applicable to conflicts between directives and tax treaties;
the role of directives under the interpretative provision of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the OECD Model Tax Treaty and the Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting;
legal basis and application of the duty of consistent interpretation to tax treaties; and
scope of the primacy of directives with respect to tax treaties.


The book offers insightful and well-informed recommendations aimed at aligning the ‘allowed’ effect under public international law and the ‘required’ effect under the laws of the EU of the directives on tax treaties, intending to ensure that directives affect tax treaties in such a way that tax treaties cannot prevent the achievement of the result of a directive. Primarily, legal doctrines, literature, and case law of the CJEU, ICJ, and arbitral tribunals form the bases of the analysis resulting in these recommendations.