Caroline Rees on Business and Human Rights

Decoding Corporate Responsibility Episode #3, 2026
Guest: Caroline Rees
Record Date: June 15, 2026
Posting Date: June 22, 2026

Caroline Rees:
The landscape of business and human rights, the field… It wasn't even a field back then that was recognizable is very, very different today to 15 years ago. Even the proposition of responsibilities for businesses in connection with human rights was really quite radical. And today I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's not seriously questioned. 

Jane Nelson:

Welcome to “Decoding Corporate Responsibility,” a production of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. I'm your host, Jane Nelson, Founding Director of the Center's Corporate Responsibility Initiative. And through the series, I'm speaking with some of the world's leading pioneers and practitioners in the fields of responsible business and finance. 

We're focused on exploring lessons and insights from the past so that together we can find practical and feasible ways to improve the future. And I am especially honored and happy to welcome today's guest, Caroline Rees. Caroline is the president and co-founder of SHIFT, which is a pioneering organization with the mission of embedding business respect for human rights into the practices of standard setters, companies, and financial institutions around the world and with a core expertise on implementing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which Caroline played an essential role in helping to develop as a lead advisor to our late colleague Professor John Ruggie, and as a former director of our governance and accountability program.

Among other leadership roles, Caroline currently serves as a member of the Imperatives Board of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, on Unilever's Sustainability Advisory Council, and on the Steering Committee of the Task Force on Inequality and Social Related Financial Disclosures. So, she works very much at the nexus of responsible business and responsible finance. It's wonderful to have you with us, Caroline, and thanks for joining us.

Caroline Rees:

Well, it's great to be with you, Jane. And goodness, you've been along every step of that journey of the last 20 years as we've done the work in this business and human rights field. So, it's a great pleasure to join with you in this conversation.

Jane Nelson:

Thank you. Thank you, Caroline. And talking about journeys, I'd love to start with a little bit of your own personal and professional journey because you've dedicated your career to being part of this movement to ensure that business gets done with respect for human rights and for fairness, justice, and people's dignity. And, love to share with us how you got started and what have been some of the key factors that have motivated your work.

Caroline Rees:

Well, I suppose it's been a journey in two parts for me, right? I sort of came some 20 years ago or so to this field, as you indicated. I grew up in a small town in the north of England, which was lovely but felt very, very small. And I was fascinated always by language and literatures. I studied French and German in my undergraduate and I really just hankered to feel more connected to the bigger world. I was drawn to international affairs, I suppose, from a fairly young age and fascinated by that stage. I almost went the route into the European Commission in Brussels, but by strange happenstance, I ended up spending a bit of time on break backpacking around the world after a bit of illness and that gave me a real insight into the even bigger stage, the wider canvas of international diplomacy. And so, I changed tack and joined the Diplomatic Service, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK and spent my first few years there, first on the Middle East and then running a transition aid program in Slovakia after Czechoslovakia split and then doing a master's in international affairs.

And that really pulled me towards an interest in multilateral settings. I was fascinated by negotiation, multilateral negotiation, and conflict resolution in particular. So back in the foreign office, I went on to roles dealing with the UN Security Council and the European Union. And then on the back of that came to a role in Geneva, heading up a small but mighty team of wonderful folks there who were leading our work on human rights in that setting. And even though human rights had been a theme through my prior roles and positions in the foreign office, this was really where it came into focus. 

And so, I landed there, gosh, I'm thinking beginning of 2003, end of 2002. And of course, human rights in that UN setting had been all about governments, right? International treaties were all about governments. The negotiations were all about governments, of course, negotiating new agreements, but also looking at and raising concerns about situations in individual countries.

And although the UN Global Compact was just, I guess, three or four years old then, it was seen as a different universe that sat in New York. It spoke to business. It didn't enter the conversation of the human rights negotiations until 2004 when it did so as a document was presented into the intergovernmental negotiations that had been developed by a group of experts called the draft norms on transnational corporations and other business enterprises related to human rights, very wordy title as the UN is good at. But it caused a real splash. And I remember acutely at that time, the experience of both the representative of the Confederation of British Industry being very animated in conversation with me about the risks, the sense that this was going to be all about pushing off onto businesses, things that were rightfully the duty, the obligation of governments and governments sliding out of those responsibilities and scapegoating business.

And on the other hand, the representative of Amnesty International UK equally animated saying, “We cannot let this go on. We see these abuses happening around the world and there's simply no pathway to remedy. There's no accountability and this has to change.” And what struck me at the time was that they were both right and that was kind of fascinating. And so, the reality was that the process that developed the document that had hit the table was not a process that had taken along the various folks that needed to be in the conversation. And it really didn't have supporters of any number amongst governments north or south, but it had elevated an issue that was ripe, that really we needed to be taking up. And so, I guess at that point for me sitting in that position, it was a little bit of an opportunity to step in and see if we couldn't craft a sensible way forward.

And that's really where the process that became the development of the UN Guiding Principles started. And it was the start of my journey into this whole subject area.

Jane Nelson:

And you played a key role, Caroline, in working with the Secretary General's office at the United Nations and with others in establishing the mandate where the late Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed our colleague, Professor John Ruggie, as the UN's special representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises. And I think I'm correct in saying it was the first time in the history of the UN that a special representative role had been appointed specifically to look at the role of the private sector in global issues and in this case, human rights. Can you tell us a bit more about how that mandate was created and what did it aim to achieve?

Caroline Rees:

So, normally when a human rights topic arises in the intergovernmental negotiations, it has a sponsor, a government that has decided to take it up and bring it proactively. And as I say, this topic didn't come that route, right? It was a draft developed by a subcommittee that was presented into the forum. So, it didn't have an owner and so there wasn't a traditional track for it to go down. One had to sort of create something and create a space for it and try and craft that in a way that would make sense and would work. And so, the first step really was a very quiet conversation. I was blessed with a wonderful ambassador, Nick Thorne, who sort of created the space to have some conversations and see what we could do. And we started with a meeting at his residence with a small cross stakeholder group.

We had maybe less than a dozen folks there, but civil society, business, government to say, “Well, what could one do in this space? What would set this conversation up for success?” And I think we'd allocated three hours, and I think within the first hour, everybody was of the same view. We needed to focus it in a person. We needed to take it out of this diffuse context and focus it in a person. But whilst the UN human rights machinery usually appointed special rapporteurs of the then Commission on Human Rights and our Human Rights Council, it wouldn't work to do that because as we know, the business world doesn't look to human rights law as its first reference point, right? It looks to other bodies of law; it looks to other drivers. And so there was no question that human rights law was going to be the fundamental reference point for the substance of much of the work, but we needed the person in this role to be able to elevate out of the Geneva bubble, as it were, away from human rights law alone and into this much bigger economic context in which business works with all the different drivers of how business works and thinks and the ability to knock on the door of CEOs.

And so, the view was that this needed to be somebody who was a former representative of the Secretary General. So, we had very quickly that crystallized idea that we needed that kind of a mandate. Then we needed, or I guess as the UK, we were part of the European Union back then, needed to get EU support. So, that was a process of some negotiations because this wasn't intuitive. I'll say that for my own government at the time, the UK, you all forget how novel at the time the idea of business responsibilities for human rights was. So, even for many leading human rights proponents amongst the European Union states, this wasn't intuitive and legal departments in various countries were a bit suspicious about the idea. So that was one part of it, get EU support. And then the other critical component was we needed to avoid this becoming a north-south football, right?

There were so many human rights issues that quite quickly could degenerate into being a north-south political football. And this topic had a little bit of that history back between the '70s and the '90s, there was this movement towards a code of conduct for transnational corporations, which founded precisely on those divides. And so, the next step was really that I looked for how to create a group of representatives that one from each of our United Nations regional groups. There were five regional groups. And these things are always, of course, as much about personalities as anything else, but also we were looking for countries that had real standing and sway within their regions. And so, the group of colleagues that I worked with were those from India, Nigeria, Argentina, and Russia. So, it was the five of us in that group that liaised on this and developed a text which then we took into negotiations and then I chaired those negotiations and side sessions between them with delegations until we could craft something that would set the table in the right way.

And you ask, what was the purpose? It was really quite rudimentary at that point. It was really about setting the table in a way that could enable a constructive process that didn't just serve a particular perspective but could help us move forward. And I know if John was still with us, he would be laughing and saying, “But it was a complete mess, Caroline.” The text that we arrived at was, they always say that a camel is a horse negotiated by committee. Well, we ended up with a three humped camel definitely, but nevertheless, that three humped camel was one that everybody could agree upon that we could bring broad consensus around. And so, that's ultimately what was adopted in 2005, a resolution asking Kafi Annan as the Secretary General to appoint a special representative with a particular mandate and elements of that mandate to move us forwards.

And so, he then appointed John, who of course had been his strategic advisor under his first term as Secretary General and was then back at Harvard Kennedy School with you.

Jane Nelson:

Exactly. And then you've fortunately for us joined what was fondly called by many people around the world as Team Ruggie, as part of a small but mighty team of colleagues who over six years carried out dozens of consultations around the world, research, produced seminal publications, and came to the point in June 2011 that the UN Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as we all call them the UNGPs. And for our audience who don't know about them, Caroline, can you tell us a little bit about what they are?

Caroline Rees:

Yes. Well, at large, they're really a blueprint for systems change, right? They're essentially saying that you can't legitimately do business while pushing significant risks and costs onto the most vulnerable workers and communities and consumers, and recognizing that ultimately doing so undermines the various societies and economies that business itself relies upon. So, that's the big picture, right? But to answer that, to address that issue, to provide that blueprint, the task wasn't to rewrite human rights. We have human rights in lots of treaties negotiated and framed and codified. We didn't need to pick a subset of them either. The focus question was, well, how does business go about relating to that? What does it mean for business then? What is their role? And so that was the focus, but it also needed then to reflect that business itself sits within a system, right? Equally, it's not the business controls all the levers and we needed to recognize that in the construct.

And so there are these three pillars to the UN Guiding Principles. The first pillar is the state's duty, that critical role of government to protect the human rights of those within their countries there or their jurisdictions and that has a whole set of aspects to it from law or policy through engagement with business. The second pillar then, that central one on the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. And then the third pillar, which is the imperative for access to remedy for people whose rights are harmed by the activities of business. So yes, keeping government very much in the frame of reference, but recognizing that it's not that businesses have more responsibility where governments fail to meet their duties or less responsibility when they meet their duties. They have independent responsibilities to respect human rights. And it may be more or less difficult to meet them depending on whether governments are regulating and enforcing appropriately, but they're not changing responsibilities.

They are the same responsibilities. And so that's the second pillar in that due diligence idea. And both of those really, we major on what does it take to prevent these harms? That's always the primary aim, but then the third pillar has to come in because the world is messy. Neither governments nor business control all the variables. Things will go wrong. Things do go wrong. In the best scenario, we will continue to have situations where people get harmed and we need remedy. We can't treat that as some surprise or crisis management moment. There have to be systems in place to deal with that too. So that's the three-part construct. And then the core of that business responsibility is this idea of human rights due diligence, which took very deliberately a familiar business idea of due diligence that you do with a merger, an acquisition, a sale, but said it's a little bit different.

It's yes, you're used to due diligence that says we need to look for where there are risks, assess them, act on that, take measures. This was saying, yes, we're going to do all of that, but this time we're centered on risks to people, not just risks to the business. We're starting in where there might be harms to people's human rights. This is not a transactional due diligence. It's an ongoing process and this requires engagement with the perspectives of those who may be affected. You can't just do it sitting at your desk and using data models. So, it took that familiar idea, but it applied it then in quite distinct ways centering on people ongoing in nature, not transactional, and engaging with the perspectives of those affected throughout.

So, that was really the central construct of it, Jane. Yeah, there's lots more one could say about the different pillars, but I think that captures the sense of what we were trying to build what was in John's vision of the system that needed to move together if we were to arrive at a fairer way, a more legitimate way for business to make its profits without the kinds of harms to people's human rights that were too often a feature of reality.

Jane Nelson:

And can you take us behind the scenes a bit and describe what were some of the key consultations and discussions that informed their design and content in the way that you've outlined?

Caroline Rees:

Yeah. I mean, it was really important for the process that it was underpinned by research and there were a lot of research elements going into that. We did some ourselves within Team Ruggie and other many major inputs came from other organizations, law firms, pro bono, supporters from other fields, academia, and so forth. So, there were a lot of questions we answered through research, but then consultation was central because process is everything in this kind of an endeavor. And it was really that recognition that there needed to be a lot of talking and listening and learning, a lot of understanding of where folks in different parts of this conversation were coming from and then looking how to on the basis of that, bring together some propositions, crystallize some propositions, and then test those, go back into conversation and consultation, retest them, refine them, and sort of rinse and repeat.

And it was that kind of iterative process. So, there were consultations, there were nearly 50 consultations across all continents. Some of them were single stakeholder, right? Sometimes you needed a safe space for one stakeholder group, be it workers, be it businesses, or civil society to have a safe space to talk openly about concerns and frustrations and opportunities. And other times it was bringing them together in conversations so that they also were part of seeing the tensions, the distinctions, the areas where we would need to reconcile competing ideas, competing approaches, realities that were intentioned in order to find more common ground. So, both of those forms of consultation were essential and then getting out. I mean, some of that could happen in meeting rooms in headquarters or in coordinated meetings in Western environments, but many of them also needed to get out around the world and it also involved site visits and so forth.

So, there was one that involved site visits. I had a factory in Bangkok, another John went to a mine in Peru. I did a whole body of work around what are the features of effective operational grievance mechanisms. So, in that work, I went with folks to a mine in Columbia, an oil and gas operation in Siberia, fruit farms in South Africa, clothing factory in Vietnam, and meeting with both sides and understanding what's missing, what works, what doesn't work, what can we learn, what does that mean for crystallizing some insights that could sit in some generalized principles. So, all of that was in the processes as well as we felt our way forwards.

Jane Nelson:

And so as a result of that, creating spaces, opening spaces, having the consultations, which as you say, were research and evidence backed in 2011, as I said earlier, the Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed the UNGPs and they became the first authoritative global standard on preventing, addressing, and mitigating adverse impacts on human rights linked to corporate and business activity. And now fast forward 15 years later, they continue to be a highly respected and applied authoritative global standard in this area. Can you share how that's been achieved and how you've managed to get them and other colleagues have managed to get them embedded in so many other both institutions and instruments around the world over the last 15 years?

Caroline Rees:

Very much a work in progress, but I do think it's right to recognize the successes and the impact. We know that so much more is needed, but the landscape of business and human rights, the field… It wasn't even a field back then that was recognizable is very, very different today to 15 years ago. As I mentioned, we were in a situation where even the proposition of responsibilities for businesses in connection with human rights was really quite radical. And today I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's not seriously questioned. The serious questions are the how and in this particular setting what's reasonable, but not the premise and not solving everything, of course, doesn't mean that something isn't working. And so even as we have these frustrations, we keep on learning. The GPs, say are a blueprint. They set clear premises, they set clear parameters for interpretation and application, but they're not a blow by blow for every scenario.

And that's where we keep learning, right? That's what's so fascinating to the work that we keep on pushing the boundaries of seeing how they apply and shape and yet again and again, seeing how they really do rise to the occasion, whether it's traditional sectors that have long been on the radar or newer ones like tech and AI that really weren't 15 years ago on the radar in the same way. So, we see this progress and we've seen it with business, we've seen it. It started out in that first part of due diligence. You have the policies. We saw a lot of attention around policies. Then it's evolved into more and more around, okay, we can assess, let's do some assessment of human rights impacts and how serious they are, how severe they are, use the guiding principles, methodologies. Too many of those landed on shelves and didn't yet move into the next stage, which is what do we do about that?

That's the whole point not to know what they are but to do something about those impacts. And so then again, we see the evolution into more and more innovation by individual companies, but more and more innovation around collaborative approaches because so many of the more endemic issues don't avail themselves of single company solutions. And then onwards into, I mean… We find ourselves at SHIFT now with the leading companies we work with more and more in that next stage of due diligence, which is how do you measure what's working? And so that evolution is happening. And whenever you see these benchmarks, you have the greatest strength usually in the assessment and policies and then weaker as we go through to measurement and of course remedy as well, which too often we come to late in the day, but we again, we see the evolution and then also with governments from the more policy oriented interventions they started with and then through procurement and so forth.

And now of course we see as the Guiding Principles and their design envisaged and John very much had in mind in their design showing up in legislation. And so we see that trajectory in what is a remarkably short time come through into that hardening of law, not just in the EU as we've seen laterally, but now with legislative proposals underway in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, we anticipate Switzerland, and potentially UK and others and other kinds of such legislative initiatives around specific issues like forced labor. So, huge evolution in just 15 years.

Jane Nelson:

Fantastic. And I think one of the other areas, Caroline, you and your colleagues have played a key role is being strong advocates for greater alignment between the business responsibility to respect human rights and business responsibility as it relates to climate, nature loss, inequality. And so often those communities of environment and human rights are on parallel tracks. How have you worked to overcome those silos and what do you see as some of the great developments there?

Caroline Rees:

Yes. I think part of that coming together is really starting with that recognition that economic inequality is a crisis of our times alongside climate change and nature loss and understanding in some ways the parallels, right. Just as it's the accumulative effects of carbon emissions from thousands and tens of thousands of individual companies together leading towards climate change and the shared challenges and threats that that creates. So, the individual effects on people's basic welfare of certain corporate practices cumulatively have driven us towards ever higher economic inequalities as value is distributed in very unfair ways and that then destabilizes the societies and economies that we all depend upon. So, it's a similar sort of shared consequence as a result. And so, as we see those parallels and understand the relationship between them, I think we also see that that connection between climate, nature, and people is not sort of just in the small instances and projects and initiatives, but in the systems challenge that we need to address.

And I think the conversation about just transition has been an interesting one back in the very early days. I think one heard quite a lot of people saying, “Well, look, what we need to do is save the planet and then that will serve people's human rights. So, let's just focus on that.” That then evolved to say, okay, no, just transition needs to mean more than it'll be better for people if we deal with the climate. It needs to be, as we deal with the climate, we need to make sure that nobody is left behind. And so that sort of idea of paying attention as we implement our climate interventions and design what they need to be to mitigate climate impacts and then to deal with adaptation, let us then think about how that may affect the most vulnerable workers and communities and do something about that too.

But I think the next iteration that we're seeing come through more recognizes that systemic connection and it recognizes that actually attention to impacts on people and their consequences and inequality is a precondition for the success of climate action. And we see that in the ways in which when people find themselves in a situation where they don't have the bandwidth. They don't have the luxury to think about 10, 20 years down the line because they can't afford to put food on the table tomorrow. They're one emergency bill away from financial collapse. They don't have the bandwidth for the best of policies at national level or at corporate level on climate. They don't have the bandwidth to collaborate in the same way with businesses in bringing about change. So, I think we're seeing now that evolution to understanding in a truly integrated way that this isn't an add-on to climate and nature.

It's a precondition for the success of addressing those crises as well.

Jane Nelson:

Where do we go from here, Caroline? As you say, in many ways the UNGPs are more important and more relevant than they've ever been, even though the world has changed dramatically since they were established. What worries you most about the next 10 years or so and what gives you hope?

Caroline Rees:

So, it's a systems problem, right, that we're trying to address here. Jane, you and I have been in various conversations recently as well as in past years about that backdrop to the system that we're in, which is the tight hold of the narrative of shareholder primacy on how we think about the role of business in society. The idea that maximizing profits, maximizing returns to shareholders is the singular defining purpose of business and that simply is failing us. And so, the challenge for us is that even as the Guiding Principles provide a blueprint to say there's a different way of doing business, right? The legitimate way of doing business is make those profits absolutely, but do it in a way that doesn't do it at the expense of the vulnerable workers and communities in our societies. But we really have to rewrite that narrative we're working within.

We really need at the higher level, and I think because of economic inequality, because of the way it's playing through in our politics in so many countries around the world, we have an opportunity to start to rewrite that narrative and say that that's not the sole purpose of business to maximize returns to shareholders, that there are other critical purposes of business in our societies. So, I think it's a worry and it's an opportunity. It's a worry in that it's a constraint on our potential success unless we do that. There's also an opportunity in the moment to get there. 

I worry also that in that context, as we try to address the consequences of having over-financialized our societies and our conversations about policy, and that's the basis of how we got into these problems, we then just think about solutions in financialized terms, right? That sometimes things have to matter more than money and the public interest is not just financial, it's about wellbeing and thriving in society.

And again, the ultimately business needs that too. But I think the hopes are very real, right? We're more connected today than ever. We know the dangers of AI, but there are many things that aren't AI specific, but are to do with the connectivity we have today that mean that there are less places to hide. Consequences flow back much more quickly. The feedback loops are there, also feedback back loops through to investors and that can mean both rewards for the right practices as well as negative consequences for the worst practices and things can hit the bottom line in the right kinds of ways. I think we do see more and more investors seeing the connections which should start to create more positive cycles and feedback loops. And I think Jane, the other really positive hope in some ways it's become cliche to say so, but it's very real, right?

Is that the younger generation is, I think, attuned to this in ways that we simply weren't 30, 20 years ago, and not least because they're truly feeling the effects of economic inequality and have been doing right from the financial crisis, if not before, through to the current realities of AI. They see that value isn't being fairly distributed. They experience the reduced economic and social mobility. They feel the frustrations as the few get more and more of the wealth and the many lose more and more of the opportunity. So, I think where the young folks are going into business or finance or civil society or academia or whatever it may be, I'm hopeful that they will not be lured into that out-of-date narrative that our economies only thrive if we maximize shareholder value and that they really at a very visceral level understand that our societies and our economies and therefore business as well fundamentally depend, as John's insight showed u,s on a level of fairness that enables basic dignity, equality, and opportunity for everyone.

Jane Nelson:

Well, thank you, Caroline, so much. And I think that's a really compelling method. I hope that our listeners can take away in terms of the power of coalitions to build consensus and over time embed soft law into hard law. The power of individual institutions, be they standard setters, be they companies, be they financial institutions, be they law firms, to be part of not just coalitions, but individual leadership and above all that critical role that each of us play as individual leaders. 

So, thank you so much for being one of those leaders and such an incredible colleague and inspiration to so many of us over the past few decades and promoting the corporate responsibility to respect human rights and people's dignity. 

Thank you again for being with us, and please join us for our next episode of “Decoding Corporate Responsibility” from the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. I'm your host, Jane Nelson, and thank you for listening. 

LINKS TO RELEVANT INFORMATION AND MATERIALS

The Mandate for UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/wg-business/special-representative-secretary-general-human-rights-and-transnational-corporations-and-other.

The UN Guiding Principles: https://www.ohchr.org/en/business-and-human-rights and/or

https://www.ohchr.org/en/publications/reference-publications/guiding-principles-business-and-human-rights.

The 2008 report that initially framed the Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework:

https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/8/5.

The Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government’s Corporate Responsibility and Citizenship Hub: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/corporate-responsibility-and-citizenship-hub.

The M-RCBG working paper on "Transforming How Business Impacts People: Unlocking the Collective Power of Five Distinct Narratives,” authored by Caroline Rees: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/Final_AWP_CRI_75_.pdf. 

Professor John Ruggie’s Working Papers: https://johnruggie.scholars.harvard.edu/.

Caroline's Rees’ essay titled “The UN Guiding Principles at 15: Enduring Relevance in a Changing World”:  https://shiftproject.org/the-un-guiding-principles-at-15-enduring-relevance-in-a-changing-world/.

Essay co-authored by former M-RCBG senior fellow John Sherman, titled “From Social Norm to Legal Practice: 15 Years of Integrating the UNGPs into Business Law”: https://shiftproject.org/from-social-norm-to-legal-practice-fifteen-years-of-integrating-the-ungps-into-business-law/.