Double Taxation Agreements: Between EU Law and Public International Law

After the first drafts of the Treaty of Lisbon were available outside of the small circle of cogniscenti, specialists of the various policies tried to establish whether the new Treaty on European Union (TEU) and Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) contained anything relevant for their specific areas of law. People interested in tax law and those interested in the relation between EU law and public international law quickly established that one familiar yet not always well understood part of the old EC Treaty was missing: The TFEU like the earlier draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, did not contain an equivalent to Article 293 EC – an Article regulating agreements between EU Member States on matters such as inter alia double taxation. In this chapter, I will embark on looking at the reasons and, more importantly, the effects of abolishing Article 293 EC in the current legal system. Several questions need to be addressed: Is there now a legal void? If not, was the initial article superfluous? What does its disappearance say about the future relation between double tax agreements concluded under public international law and EU law? The issue of double tax agreements in the context of the EU raises some fundamental questions about the complex multi-level legal world we are living in.