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Okay. Thank you so much. First to the Reverend Dr. Liz Carmichael for inviting me to speak to the conference and

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to my good friend Dr. Izabella Button for encouraging Liz Carmichael to invite me.

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And thanks, Professor Caplan, for the kind introduction.

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To say that the right Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams is a tough act to follow is modesty, what you call in these parts British understatement.

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But I just appreciate your extraordinarily insightful presentation.

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And I think of you as I'm sure everybody in the room and beyond does, is the distilled essence of knowledge and wisdom.

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It really deeply appreciate your comments and humbled to follow you, as I'm sure we all have to have listened to you.

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So thank you. So I am indeed going to take a different tack here, although like Rowan Williams coming at it initially from an historical perspective,

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maybe drawing just a bit on having earned a history degree down the road here just a bit just a few years ago.

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But I'm going to go light on the history until we get to the last several decades, and I'll get into it a little more deeply then.

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But like Rowan Williams, I also divide my presentation into three parts to support the fundamental proposition that economic actors,

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business and especially multinational corporations are not only intertwined with war and peace,

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with conflict, with the drivers impacts and consequences of conflict, but also can,

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should and indeed must be conscious, responsible and accountable actors in the world of peace and conflict.

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I worry too much, too often that we view these vast,

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impersonal forces and actors and huge multinational corporations in the billions

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of pounds and euros and dollars in the end behind them as impenetrable.

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I and I really want to challenge that default assumption by talking about the efforts in recent decades,

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but very specifically what many of us are up to now over the last year in trying to accelerate

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and to complete the exit of Western companies from Russia following Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

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So I'll first give a historical perspective of some antecedents or precedents from recent decades that take us to this moment

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that has really crystallised the debate around the responsibilities of multinational corporations in the conflict arena and,

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I hope, galvanised action. And then second, I'll talk about some of the issues and dilemmas that multinational corporations are dealing with,

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as some are trying to get out of Russia, those that have not.

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And some of the dilemmas that we on the side of those who engage and try to persuade,

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cajole and at times confront companies have to think about ourselves from a human rights perspective.

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And then finally, I'll try to draw out very quickly some of the lessons,

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the consequences and further implications of what we've seen in recent months for a broader notion of what I call,

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I hope, not too grandly or naively what could be a new idea of geopolitical corporate responsibility.

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So first, back to the history. And to make a sweeping comment that merely condenses two millennia of human

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experience in just a few sentences before we get to the middle of the 20th century.

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But it's a statement of fact, but one that is volumes have been written about the the world of commerce and trade,

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of capital and labour have been intertwined with war and peace, with conflict since the ancient world.

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And fast forward through ancient from ancient slavery to the structures and strictures.

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Sort of medieval feudalism, which I studied down the road while doing supposedly modern history in.

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Fast forward, then even to the 18th century and beyond the rise of the East India Company and the emergence of multinational corporations as agents,

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instruments of imperialism, colonialism, expansionism, and not just the British empires,

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but of others in the whole tragic history of slavery and the deep, deep, deep complicity of private actors,

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business actors that helped build and enrich but also morally diminish this great country and so many others,

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including my own, with the transatlantic slave trade.

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And finally, a reckoning on both sides of the Atlantic about that tragic legacy that is still with us in the 21st century.

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But then to fast forward again to five pivot points in the last eight decades, actually four in the last eight decades,

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that really set the stage for the actions and dilemmas that we've seen as companies have exited

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again in completely from Russia in the last 14 months since Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

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So I want to start first with an area that I spent two years working on day and night on behalf of the U.S. State Department in the mid 1990s.

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And that was the deep complicity of business in Nazi Germany and especially in the Holocaust.

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And historians have written for decades about German big business aiding and abetting Hitler's rise to power.

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We didn't understand very well until the mid to late 1990s when there was a global movement with the U.S. and UK governments tip of

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the spear at the tip of the spear to come to grips with the then previously hidden financial and economic dimensions of the Holocaust.

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And you'll recall, in that period of the mid-to-late nineties, the intense focus on the Swiss banks,

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their icy indifference to Holocaust survivors, victims families who were unable to access dormant accounts after decades.

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The focus on the huge German industrial companies willingly employing slave labour of Jews,

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of Soviet prisoners, of Roma, of homosexual gay people or other marginalised people, political dissidents.

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If they weren't killed in concentration camps, they were worked to death in the slave factories.

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So we had a huge reckoning around that.

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And finally, in the in the 1990s, and we still read every month or two about the restitution of Nazi looted art.

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This is a continuing saga from the 1940s, and then that takes us to the 1970s and eighties to the second major antecedent.

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And I'm looking at Liz Carmichael. I've just had the pleasure of getting to know since yesterday and knowing of her extraordinary work,

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first as a doctor and then as a conciliator peace builder in apartheid South Africa of the anti-apartheid movement,

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which arose in the mid to late 1970s.

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I recall it well in my undergraduate days at Berkeley in the late seventies, and then here again a couple of years later.

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And that was the most extraordinary example we've seen of companies consciously exiting a racist,

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authoritarian state under tremendous pressure from activists and clergy and responsible investors in their very early initial stages.

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And that man, Nelson Mandela, credited, as did that Bishop Tutu, that exodus of Western companies,

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of having exerted political and moral as well as economic and financial pressure on the apartheid regime.

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That then takes us to the next antecedent or precedent which played out in the early to mid 2000.

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And that was the genocide at least as the US government called it, in Darfur and the international attention.

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On those atrocities and killings in Darfur and the divestment movement,

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which was largely but not entirely an American agenda that took substantial assets out of companies,

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particularly oil and infrastructure companies that were supporting the regime in Khartoum.

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That was the biggest exercise we had seen of divestment, at least in the United States since the apartheid,

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the anti-apartheid divestment movement of the mid-seventies to the mid eighties.

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And it's one now that is on many of our minds in recent days for obvious reasons,

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as we see this these terrible civilian casualties and the promise we had hoped two years ago of the

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democratic transition in Sudan dashed by this internecine conflict within within the military.

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And then finally, that takes us to the Russian invasion, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and much of it,

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which really now is the second part of of my presentation and much of the focus in the media and the public policy discourse

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has appropriately focussed on this massive wall of economic and financial sanctions developed by and imposed by the US,

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the UK, the EU coordination through the G7.

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And those sanctions were regime.

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That sanctions regime was under development beginning in the autumn of 2021 in anticipation of based on U.S. intelligence,

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in particular, of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which, of course, happened on the 24th of February 2022.

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And those sanctions were imposed some within hours, others days, weeks,

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and continue to mount the less visible and well understood dimension of this financial and economic prong,

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if you will, of the conflict is the exit of foreign companies, mostly European, UK, North American, U.S., Canadian, some from Japan, Australia.

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And the numbers are significant.

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It's actually the largest exodus that we've seen of companies from a conflict situation or based on any

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principles whatsoever since that massive exodus from apartheid South Africa in the late seventies to mid 1980s.

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What's been striking about this exodus is that it began to happen within 72 or 96 hours after the invasion,

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with the initial announcements that last weekend of February last year by Shell and BP in anticipation of sanctions against the oil and gas sector.

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And that became the basis really of a parade out not only from the oil and gas sector, but from other sectors as well.

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And to be frank, I think there was a lot of I don't want to be so crude, of course, to suggest that it was PR reasons,

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but let's dress it up a little as reputational and follow the leader in the sector and let's not get caught out.

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There were some ethical considerations by some companies,

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but it's been striking how few of the companies have exited have explicitly cited human

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rights or an attack on the international rules based order as the reason for their exit.

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And that's one of the missions of BE for Ukraine,

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is to make these companies more conscious and responsible actors by stating explicitly their reasons for exit,

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as well as for accelerating the exit of others.

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So about 40% and there's been a war over the data, as there often is in such controversial contexts.

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But about 40% of over the 3000 foreign companies that were operating in Russia at the

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time of the invasion have announced their withdrawal or suspended their activity.

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About another 40% remain in Russia, with less than 10% having exited completely.

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Another cut of the numbers. And again, there's some discrepancies.

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We've some of us worry that we are sometimes mixing apples and oranges with the analysis, but.

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Over 1700 companies, foreign companies remain operating in Russia, but over 1400 are have been taking are taking active steps to leave.

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That's another way of slicing and dicing the numbers here.

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The narrative until the last couple of months has been focussed on the outside world, acknowledging and plot and applauding this exodus.

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What we've been doing for BE for Ukraine is also to acknowledge and applaud the exodus of Western companies from Russia.

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But to put the focus at least as much even more on the other side of the ledger of those companies remaining.

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And to make the case both generally and sectoral and sector specifically and companies specifically, why companies still in Russia can leave.

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So we wrestled with these issues.

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It would be wonderful to look at this problem in purely political and moral

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terms and to say out and to expect that buttons are pushed and exits are made.

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It's a little more complicated. There are indeed legal and even ethical complexities in addition to the moral and

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political certainties that should argue for the exit of foreign companies from Russia.

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The legal, their legal and ethical complexities that have to be addressed, they can't be simply dismissed.

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Above all, the safety, the security of the Russian employees of foreign enterprises operating in Russia,

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their contractual obligations, their bankruptcy strictures for companies that try to shut down or claim bankruptcy.

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There's concerns over nationalisation and expropriation.

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There's the difficulty of finding finding a buyer.

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And sometimes those buyers represent interests, whether oligarchs or not, that are seen close to the Kremlin, close to Putin directly.

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And, you know, one has to ask reasonably whether the selling to such Russian interests is a net positive.

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There are legal barriers to exit. There's now exit tax that's being imposed that goes right to the Russian treasury and therefore,

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by definition, at least indirectly funds the war machine,

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the war effort, the killing of Ukrainian civilians, the soldiers, as well as the Russian conscripts put into the trenches.

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So these are legal and ethical complexities to be not to be dismissed, but to be addressed where we have little patience, ah,

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for the companies that simply cite legal or even ethical complexities and assume that they're impossible to, that they're insurmountable.

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And to us that's really a unacceptable position.

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You know, our view, our base view, baseline view here is that companies remaining in Russia are fundamentally complicit,

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at least indirectly, in the war effort of most of all by paying taxes at this point to the regime that do fund this war effort.

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And that's the most obvious form of complexity of complicity.

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There's also the exposure of foreign companies, according to Russian law that was invoked last September of 2022 for employees of Russia,

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foreign companies to face mandatory conscription.

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So foreign multinationals are still operating in Russia in the uncomfortable position of the risk of some of their

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employees being taken out of the workplace and put into the trenches in in in Donbass or elsewhere in southern Ukraine.

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So and then there are dual use technologies and weapons, and those are mostly under sanction at this point.

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But there's still some gaps in the sanctions regime that are the U.S. and others are trying to close.

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But I do want to mention that you emphasise that there are some legitimate ethical considerations here, ethical and indeed political.

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And one is in the technology realm, the other is in the pharmaceutical and medical realm.

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On the technology side, most.

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Tech exports are under sanctions. U.S.-U.K.

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EU different jurisdictions, particularly the ones that have military applications.

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But a case was made to the White House and the U.S. Treasury last spring by a coalition of NGOs led by Access Now,

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which is stands for Internet Rights and the Wikimedia Foundation,

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to carve out an exception for Internet service providers on the grounds that from a democracy and human rights point of view,

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that the last thing we should want to do is to cut off Russian civil society, Russian civilians from the international Internet.

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And in my view, that was a reasonable and responsible and the essential compromise to make in the service of a greater good.

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It gets trickier when we get to essential medicines for pharmaceuticals.

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And I know that Carmichael is a former medic and others perhaps in the audience.

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And, you know, my views of this are blissfully uninformed by any medical expertise, but are informed somewhat by engagement.

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In recent months, with two or three of the major global pharma companies which have chosen to stay in,

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and they cite essential medicines and there is indeed a list put together by the World Health Organisation.

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And one can make a reasonable argument that for human rights and humanitarian reasons it is necessary,

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indeed essential to continue to provide such essential medicines to Russian civilians.

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There's a counterargument I hear from Ukrainian colleagues who say that responsibility is on the Russian government.

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They have to do that. The Western companies don't. And for that matter,

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most of the Western companies that are claiming essential medicines and staying in

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are also continuing to sell non-essential medicines that are not on the W.H.O. list.

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And other medical devices, including over-the-counter items that really cannot be justified, is absolutely essential and irreplaceable.

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But there's some shades of grey when we come to that arena where we do have to take into account,

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in my view, the ethical considerations from a human rights and a humanitarian point of view.

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But then we get to excuses and we go from reasonable to frankly absurd, in my view, rationales.

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So poor no rijkaard the international liquor conglomerate produces Beefeater Gin,

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which has a little bit of brand resonance in this country in particular.

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They resumed operations, suspended operations initially after the war, and then resumed exports to Russia.

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I don't think that gin is as refreshing as it is in the spring and summer and tonic or otherwise is essential.

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And likewise, Oreos. I mean, Mondelez, I apologise, is an American that Kraft took over your great brand company.

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You know, Cadbury, that along with Lever Brothers.

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Now, Unilever was the founding force in late Victorian corporate social responsibility, as paternalistic as it was,

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but a values driven company and joined by John Lewis and others later and now Mondelez,

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whatever a computer generated corporate jargon and brand name and our dear old Oreos are now being sold, sold still in Russia.

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Not essential, hardly. So, you know,

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we've taken a very strong stand in particular with Mondelez and a frankly gone after them rather mercilessly after engaging with them privately.

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But no, no effective end. And then there's the case of Shell, which, like along with BP,

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led the initial parade out and I wouldn't give them too much credit because they

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clearly anticipated there would be sanctions from the UK government and others,

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but led the parade out in that last weekend of February last year and now Global Witness in the Guardian and be for Ukraine.

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Our organisation for good reasons are going after Shell because they seem to be on the verge

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of of being rewarded and accepting a billion plus payment from the Russian government.

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It buys out assets, including the Sakhalin two project in the Russian Far East,

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and the Ukrainian government calls that billion or so payout that has not yet been made to be their blood money and has

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demanded that any such payout be transferred to expenditure in supporting a green reconstruction of a post-war Ukraine.

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So there's different twists and turns here.

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So I turn now to the third and final part of my remarks, and that's to ask what can we learn together from this?

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Not well enough. Understood, in my view, phenomenon of Western business, exit from Russia in the broader implications.

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So I think, first of all, that Russia's attack on Ukraine has given long overdue impetus to the whole business and conflict agenda,

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which began to emerge in the mid to late 1990s with initiatives in the UK,

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the use of the voluntary principles and security and human rights, which is the global standard for extractive companies,

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oil and mining of how they should work with security forces in conflict zones and many other initiatives.

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But we've had a whole emergence in the converging worlds of of business and human rights, business and conflict around human rights, due diligence.

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And that is the notion that companies have a responsibility to do due diligence, to do research and analysis, undertake human rights,

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risk assessments of projects they may consider beginning or projects that they're operating,

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countries that they're operating in the first, such human rights due diligence, a human rights impact assessment.

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Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly to some, was commissioned by BP in early 2002 for its West Papua liquefied natural gas project there.

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And then that became the model for really a whole cottage industry around human rights

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impact assessments and then the UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights.

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Some of you were aware of involved with, led by the late professor John Ruggie produced those UN guiding principles on business

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and human rights with human rights due diligence as their real operational heartbeat.

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So what we're seeing now is that the this invasion of Ukraine has really given impetus to human rights due diligence,

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particularly in conflict settings. And a lot of good work has been done, including in the UN system,

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the UN Development Program just in the last year of refreshing and updating and refining ways of going at human rights due diligence.

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I as somebody who spent some years early in my career in the belly of the beast of corporate

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America and has been in and out of corporate offices and in c-suites for decades,

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I couldn't say that we need to meet these companies partly where they are.

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They've been doing political and geopolitical risk analysis for half a century, since the 1970s, but still too few do human rights due diligence.

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We need a fusion of that geopolitical human rights analysis and human rights due diligence.

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Such a fusion may have made companies realise that Putin's seizure of parts of Donbas and indeed of Crimea was the beginning of the invasion,

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that the invasion didn't start just on the 24th of February 2022.

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I can tell you, though, that sleep is being lost and headaches are being experienced in the c-suites,

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in corporate boardrooms in Japan and Australia and across the Atlantic and elsewhere around the world,

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worrying about, you know, what a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

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And that is on everyone's minds, at least in the corporate and investment world.

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So I want to conclude here by suggesting, as I've been trying to over the last year, as somebody who looks.

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To events that have crystallised certain challenges and opportunities that may also galvanise new ways of thinking and acting.

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And at the risk of being naive,

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I would like to think like to think that this foreign mostly western business exit is incomplete as it is from Russia can build a bridge to something.

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I call, for what it's worth, a new notion of geopolitical corporate responsibility.

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Now, that sounds fanciful, but if we just step back and think about this international rules based order, which is on sort of life support of rule,

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of law, of reaching decisions through global institutions, through the U.N. and respecting those rules as our own.

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Two governments, the U.S. and the U.K. certainly did not in 2003,

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whatever else we felt about Saddam Hussein and his ghastly treatment of his own people.

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But that invasion was a flagrant violation of the U.N. charter and gave some succour to later to Putin.

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We have to be mindful of inconsistencies and hypocrisies, but there is a rules based order still,

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and there have been no greater beneficiaries of it over the last three quarters of a century than these

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great big multinational corporations who depend on that rules based order for trade and investment,

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for and for rule of law within countries.

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There's a good reason why the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals has goals 16 peace,

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justice and strong institutions as underpinnings of sustainable and profitable, responsible business environments for companies and investors.

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So I hope that a new geopolitical corporate responsibility would compel at least some companies,

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some leading companies, to think about their reliance on this rules based order to find ways to support its tottering,

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tattered remnants, to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals,

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to support what I call the shared space that should link business and civil society,

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the shared space of rule of law, accountable governance, civic freedoms, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly,

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freedom of association and for business also to recognise its fundamental responsibilities working

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through the international community and its battered institutions to address the inequality crisis,

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the climate crisis. What we can't do is go back to business as usual with the international rules based order,

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with all the shots called by the Permanent Five in the U.N. and Pax America.

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It's got to be a rebalanced, refocused, south, north, east, west.

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But there have got to be rules of the road.

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And I just have to say that I've become more and more he was respectful, as we all need to be and I hope try to be of other views of,

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you know, the dismissal of certain standards as just Western standards.

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Well, the UN Declaration on Human Rights is a global standard,

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forged as much or more by people from global south countries as it was by Eleanor Roosevelt,

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whose statue is up here in Mansfield College outside the new port of Vera Institute of Human Rights.

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It's global, the ILO, International Labour Organisation, core labour standards, you know, for no forced labour,

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no child labour antidiscrimination, for God's sake, global standards, not Western global standards.

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We need business to embrace these. And finally, I would just say that business shares a responsibility to work for peace.

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Governments, though, in civil society, we share a responsibility to make business accountable.

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It's not just on them. It's on us.

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And I've thought long and hard about this over my work, over many years of trying to engage with these huge concentrations of power, corporate power.

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And it's up to us, not them, just them, how they conduct themselves in the most vital matters of war and peace,

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of inequality, of of the climate crisis. I hope that this conflict will reinforce the conviction that we all have the moral,

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political and economic agency to work for peace and human rights, all including business.

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And I think this conference will remind us. Thank you.