Thank you, Eduardo, and thank you of course to Michael for the invitation and forcing

us to confront the big questions and to Anita and Michael for their contributions to this

discussion but also for your contribution as members of the UN Working Group to Business

and Rights Scholarship, both of you for your unwavering stamina and generally being all

around great people and inspiring role models for all the students in the audience.

So thank you sincerely for that.

I think one thing in common across Anita and Michael's presentations is an acknowledgement

that the tensions, frustration and confusion that Michael referred to, which are given

expression to in the contestation that we see today, are linked somehow to the contemporary

role of business enterprises in society.

And I think around that topic, overall both Anita and, or despite that, both Anita and

Michael remain, let's call them business human rights optimists, and actually Michael you

did self-identify as an optimist, so I'm glad that accords with my own assessment.

And you do see business human rights as part of the solution.

And Michael highlighted in particular the role of the guiding principles in enhancing

public debate, promoting shared values of human rights across the private sector through

national action plans, and of course Anita has touched on the differences between the

business and human rights paradigm, if we can call it that, and what went before it,

corporate social responsibility, and has also highlighted particular legislative changes

for which the UN guiding principles have been the driver at national level, both in terms

of motivation and also in terms of the specific form of legislation adopted based on human

rights due diligence, which we see in the modern slavery act, the loi de vigilance in

France and so forth.

And of course finally focusing on an emerging phenomenon perhaps of business advocacy in

favour of human rights defenders in terms of context of shrinking civic space, and in

the support of business human rights regulation counter perhaps to your intuitions about how

business might react and often does react in the face of the threat of legislation.

So as a basis of their business human rights optimism both I think Anita and Michael have

pointed to specific progressive changes, new behaviours identifiable within the corporate

sector, new institutional attitudes in government that can be plausibly linked to the guiding

principles.

But I think what the exam question encourages us to engage with is the next level and the

broader discussion and contest between optimistic and pessimistic tendencies in business human

rights and human rights more broadly, human rights discourse more broadly.

And the sorts of specific developments that Anita and Michael have described and shared

with us, I think for business human rights pessimists are just grist to the mill.

Those kinds of trends and phenomena are just doodles in the margins of history and irrelevance

in the face of the really salient truth of our time.

The climate crisis we now face linked to an economic growth paradigm which is premised

in turn on unsustainable patterns of consumption for which corporations have been a principal

driver with governments as their lackeys and international and national law and legal institutions

as both their tool and their vehicle.

The unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power we see globally and inequality despite

the rise of a global middle class and a decline in absolute poverty in line with globalisation

in recent years.

And finally also the insidious role of the tech giants now in politics, in the economy

and in our daily lives and in the very way we know ourselves and our peers.

So for business and human rights pessimists if the emergence of the business and human

rights field in tandem with the pathologies of globalisation is at best a coincidence,

it also demonstrates it to be just perhaps a benign but ultimately impotent diversion.