Good morning. I want to also extend my thanks to Marcus and to all of you today for a really

rich discussion. I'll make two confessions and I should also say that my colleague Michael

deserves a lot of credit. He's very humble, but he was one of the initial members of the

working groups that had one of the hardest jobs of convincing states and civil society

and business that the guiding principles were a document that they should embrace. And so

we owe a big vote of thanks to him. My confessions are, number one, that I am not, by schooling

a human rights scholar. I am a banking lawyer and a banking regulator who many years ago

had a conversion when I realized that banks were financing projects that led to human

rights abuses around the world and were taking the money of dictators. And so I'm a converted

banker who decided that I was going to write about human rights and really embrace this

issue. But for those of you here, if I say anything that's inaccurate, please forgive

me. The second is that I'm an American law professor and so again, if there are any other

Americans in the audience, to keep my students awake, they expect sort of storytelling, Ted

talks and great pictures. So this is just my cultural style. So please forgive me. But

the question that was posed to us today I felt was like an exam question, right? Business

and human rights, part of the problem or part of the solution, discuss, right? So thank

you for that exam question. But I want to thank you because it made me actually stop,

right? That for 20 years I have been really embracing this world of corporate accountability

and really focusing on trying to change the debate. And so I live in this universe where

my world at the moment is the UN guiding principles in business and human rights, right? I've

accepted them as my framework. It's the framework I work with and that I basically evangelize.

So this question actually made me step back and say, well, is the business and human rights

movement as we now know it and are the UN guiding principles actually part of the problem

or part of the solution? And I think, so thank you for that because it was a moment of reflection

to step back and to sort of say, is this working? So in doing that, right, I have here of course

a slide with saying behaving badly. And I really enjoyed this morning's discussion because

I wanted to say that from my perspective we need to step back and remember that the reason

that we have this business and human rights framework is because of perceived governance

gaps, right? That we have corporations, in particular transnational corporations from

the so-called global north that have been operating through subsidiaries, joint ventures

and affiliates and through supply chains in countries around the world where there may

be weak governance, the absence of the rule of law, and they've been doing so without

having any real accountability or responsibility to rights holders, right? So the governance

gap is that we have cross border business, we have transactions, and we have victims

and jurisdictions that can't seek access to effective remedy, right? And that has been

something that we've lived with for many times. People can speak about after World War II,

we can also speak about Bhopal, but the governance gap is something that we've lived with for

a long time. And so the business and human rights movement was born of trying to close

that gap, right, to say what responsibilities do these transnational corporations have to

their victims who are geographically far away when we have all of these obstacles relating

to the fact that corporations and subsidiaries are different legal persons, that we have

issues of limited liability, that we don't have a right to sue necessarily in the court

where that multinational is housed or headquartered. So with all of that, what are we going to

do? Well, what we have today is this framework, the guiding principles. Now, the framework

is not a binding framework per se. States have committed to it, but this simply means

that they have reaffirmed their traditional duty under human rights law, but that's what

they've done. And companies are asked to respect human rights, which means that they're meant

to do more than respect local law wherever they operate and think about human rights

treaties as the way to measure their conduct. That's significant. But again, it's not binding,

right? So civil society continues to be discontented about this because there's still a gap. There's