1. Name of organization:
- Campaña de Objeción Fiscal (Tax Resistance Campaign)
- Address:
- Street: La Merced 18
- City: Pamplona-Iruñea
- Province or state: Navarra
- Postal code: 31001
- Country: Spain
- Telephone: 0-34-948 210 530
- fax: 0-34-948 210 530
- e-mail: kemiruna@arrakis.es
- web-page: none
2. Name of person submitting report:
- Pedro Otaduy
- Address:
- Street: Paseo de Sarasate 14, 5°
- City: Pamplona-Iruñea
- Province or state: Navarra
- Postal code: 31001
- Country: Spain
- Telephone: 0-34-948 220 642
- fax: none
- e-mail: kerimuna@arrakis.es
3. Organizational structure:
We have not an organizational structure. We work in different groups in several towns and villages of Spain and we usually meet twice a year in order to coordinate our campaigns and to share information.
Officers, with names and titles, committees; membership: there is not any kind of formal membership but every year there are more than two thousand tax resisters involved in our campaign.
4. Budget, and budgetary categories.
We haven't got any.
5. Main goal of organization; what types of activities does this organization engage in; and how?
Lobbying for peace tax fund legislation: we don't work on this area.
War tax resistance: we are specially focused in this area.
Educational activities: none as a group.
Other: we work together with some other organizations on antimilitarism, the criticism of military budgets, against the international and national weapons trade… and ecologism, helping in developing, groups against racism and xenophobia…
6. Current size and scope of the movement in your country:
There are over two thousand people who do tax resistance each campaign.
7. Report on recent history and current status regarding:
Legislative/parliamentary developments:
none
War tax resistance: we are still working on it, but we have not been able to increase the real presence of our message in our society.
Judicial (court cases related to conscientious objection to military taxation): Our tax resistance has not got any judicial response from the Exchequer. So far, if it realizes that we have put some part of our taxes in a different place and not in their accounts, then we receive a letter asking for this amount. Then we refuse to pay for it and several months later the Exchequer takes this money out of our bank account. Since we haven't found a good way to avoid this, what we do is to use it to get more publicity, increase our presence with the newspapers, so the people hear once again about our criticism against militarism.
Relationships with religious bodies; civil rights organizations, other groups, grass-roots organizing, and educational activities: The people who are active in different organizations are usually people who do tax resistance. Along the year it's very normal to hear them and read in their papers and meetings how they join our points of view to theirs. The relationship is very clear: the deficits in so many social fields could be filled by the money that is spent on military purposes.
8. Peace-related projects supported by your organization:
Each tax resister has to decide to whom to give the money we don't pay to the Exchequer, so a very large number of different organizations have been supported by the Spanish tax resistance campaign for the past seventeen years. But we usually propose one or two different projects every year (some times even three). Each year these projects receive over five million peseta (27,000 euro, more than US $30,000). Conscientious objection groups in Turkey, Paraguay, Colombia, educational projects in Sahara, Nicaragua, Lesotho, Colombia, training for reach drinking water in Eritrea, groups of women in Philippines and Guatemala, the fight against military camps in Spain, groups working on social development… are some of the purposes we have had.
9. Publications and other resources produced (video and audiotapes; graphics) by your organization; other recent publications which you consider especially significant:
Not a specific one, except for the different leaflets we usually prepare for the campaign of tax resistance. We have a special symbol that identifies us: a broken bomb with a flower and a seagull.
10. Plans for the near future:
We have to go on. We have to be more people, quite more people than we are nowadays so we have to work the way to spread our message not only in the income tax season (in Spain it is during the spring)
11. Significant challenges:
none
12. Other significant topics:
none