From Social Norm to Legal Practice: Fifteen Years of Integrating the UNGPs into Business Law

This essay is part of Shift’s series marking the 15th anniversary of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

In the fifteen years since the UN Human Rights Council endorsed the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the corporate legal community has largely moved past its initial skepticism.

Major international and national bar associations now support considering the soft law of the UNGPs in providing legal advice and services to business clients. Companies and law firms alike have moved from generally endorsing the UNGPs to actively using them as a practical framework for addressing human rights issues in supply chains.

Most large law firms now advise business clients on business and human rights (BHR), either through specialized practice groups or as part of broader ESG practices. This trend reflects several factors:

  • The rise of human rights due diligence (HRDD) and disclosure laws (especially in the EU).1
  • Growing client exposure to legal claims for complicity in abuses.2
  • Potential liability for boards if they fail to properly oversee the management of human rights risks.3
  • Increasing recognition of the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.4
  • Increased “greenwashing” claims alleging that companies have not acted consistently with their stated human rights and environmental policies.5
  • Empirical research on global supply chains showing that traditional, top‑down codes of conduct, monitoring, and buyer‑imposed contractual compliance mechanisms have
  • produced only limited and often unsustainable improvements in working conditions, and cannot by themselves prevent or mitigate serious labor and human rights abuses.6

However, progress in integrating the UNGPs into legal practice has been inconsistent and uneven. In 2022, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights warned that lawyers may be limiting their advice to avoid short-term legal liability for their clients, rather than considering broader UNGPs alignment. Legal advice that focuses only on clients’ (narrow) hard-law legal duties overlooks the role of lawyers as “wise counselors” who advise on soft-law norms, such as the UNGPs. It also overlooks the possibility that the client may use legal advice to abuse, or contribute to the abuse of, human rights impacts. We elaborate on this in Section 2 below.

This essay traces the integration of the UNGPs into legal practice from the UN Mandate of the late Prof. John Ruggie, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and the author of the UNGPs, to the present day, and explores potential future directions.

1. Overcoming the initial skepticism of the corporate bar /

Because of their influence on the corporate C-suite, Prof. Ruggie identified corporate lawyers as the most significant new players he brought into the fold of discussions on BHR.7 In 2008, a prominent Wall Street lawyer, Martin Lipton, wrote to his clients, expressing concerns that the UNGPs would impose additional burdens on boards beyond the traditional fiduciary duty of oversight.8 Two years later, he became an advocate for the UNGPs as an important governance tool to help boards oversee the company’s management of human rights risks.9

HRDD resembles familiar corporate and legal due diligence processes, making it recognizable to corporate lawyers. It draws on traditional risk management and compliance systems but has a different purpose: to understand and address a company’s human rights risks, as well as its business risks. While there are meaningful distinctions between human rights and business risks, where risks to people’s human rights are greatest, there is often strong convergence with risk to the business.10 The case for effective integration of HRDD into corporate governance and leadership can therefore be made on commercial, legal, and moral grounds. Through systematic engagement with stakeholders, HRDD helps companies identify potential involvement in abuses, assess and mitigate those risks, monitor progress, publicly communicate results, and provide remedies to those adversely affected. In other words, it functions as an internal control system that provides critical insights into a company’s overall human rights performance.11

2. Gaining the support of professional legal associations /

The International Bar Association, which is the voice of the international legal profession, issued guidance on BHR in 2016 and updated it in 2023. It explicitly applied the UNGPs to law firms, recognizing them as business entities responsible for respecting human rights under UNGP 14. It emphasizes that legal advice and services can facilitate corporate abuses even when client actions are technically lawful. It recommends that firms assess whether their work is likely to cause or contribute to harm in clients’ operations or supply chains and encourages lawyers to serve as “wise counsel,” advising on both hard and soft law standards to help prevent or reduce harm.12

In the United States, the American Bar Association (ABA), which is the world’s largest voluntary bar association, has taken similar steps. In August 2024, its House of Delegates approved Resolution 604, which heavily references the IBA’s 2023 guidance and previous ABA policy. It urges lawyers and firms to avoid causing or contributing to negative human rights impacts, encouraging them to advise clients more holistically by applying all relevant standards for responsible business conduct.13

Finally, in 2022, twenty-two major international law firms founded the Business and Human Rights Lawyers Association (BHRLA),a global platform dedicated to integrating the UNGPs into everyday legal practice.

3. Model Supply Chain Contract Clauses
(MCCs) /

In 2021, following consultations with over 200 stakeholders, a working group of the ABA Business Law Section published a set of model contract clauses (MCCs) to serve as a practical tool for companies to integrate HRDD into their international supply contracts. The MCCs, along with the Responsible Purchaser Code of Conduct (the Buyer Code), seek to translate the UNGPs into binding contractual commitments to improve the respect for human rights across international supply chains.14 The MCCs are not intended to simply be copy-pasted into supply contracts, but rather to be selected and adapted to the particular contract as part of the company’s HRDD process.

The MCCs reject the traditional, top-down model in which all compliance obligations fall solely on the supplier, and move away from strict-liability clauses that treat any imperfection as a material breach. Such requirements incentivize suppliers to hide problems rather than disclose them, disrupting HRDD at step one. Instead, the MCCs embrace a shared-responsibility approach, committing both parties to uphold human rights standards together, including through buyer obligations to engage in responsible purchasing practices that do not contribute to adverse impacts. If a problem does arise, the MCCs prioritize victim-centered remediation over “cut and run” termination, making exit a last resort to be pursued responsibly only after remediation efforts have been exhausted.

The MCCs have already achieved significant success with companies, industry associations, investor groups, civil society, and public and private standard-setters. They have also become a transatlantic benchmark. For example, the European Responsible and Sustainable Supply Chains Working Group is using the MCCs as a starting point to develop a set of European model clauses (EMCs), which adapt the contract-based due diligence system of the MCCs to the EU legal context while remaining consistent with the UNGPs and OECD standards.

Specifically, the EMCs, which will be finalized later in 2026, are designed to align with the requirements of the EU’s landmark due diligence legislation, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).15 Notably, they track the CSDDD’s requirements that contracts must not be used to transfer due diligence responsibilities to business partners, that contracts must assign responsibilities between buyers and suppliers, that in-scope companies must review their purchasing policies to ensure they contribute to the payment of living wages and do not aggravate adverse impacts, and that exit must be a last resort.16 The EMCs also serve as a key reference for the European Commission in its upcoming guidance on due diligence-aligned contracts, contemplated under Article 18 of the CSDDD.

But, although the U.S. does not have HRDD legislation, due diligence-aligned contracts may be of even greater legal importance there as the Trump Administration launches investigations against dozens of trading partners (including the 27 EU Member States) to evaluate whether they are doing enough to prohibit and limit trade with countries that use forced labor. These investigations, which could lead to a new wave of tariffs, will be carried out under Section 301 of the 1974 US Trade Act, which grants the executive broad authority to impose trade sanctions to address unfair trading practices that harm the U.S. economy. 

This recent effort to justify imposing tariffs should prompt companies to review their contracts to ensure they are designed to support HRDD and prevent, rather than exacerbate, the risks of forced labor. As explained in a policy brief by the Responsible Contracting Project, due diligence-aligned supply contracts can reduce both the likelihood and the severity of enforcement actions under Section 307 of the 1930 US Tariff Act and the EU Forced Labor Regulation enacted in 2024.17

4. The Rule of Law /

The rule of law is a load-bearing beam for justice, democracy, and human rights. Lawyers have an obligation to uphold the rule of law in a manner consistent with international human rights norms and standards.18 Although the corporate responsibility to respect human rights is not restricted by domestic law, the strength of the rule of law framework within a particular country affects the likelihood of business-related abuse in that country.

However, that progress has hit a rough patch with the current U.S. Administration. In its 2016 and 2023 BHR guidance documents, the IBA emphasized the critical importance of lawyers’ independence, describing it as vital for the provision of unbiased advice, even if that advice might offend the government or other third parties.19 However, the Administration has engaged in actions that the ABA and IBA have described as attacking the rule of law, including retaliation against certain lawyers and firms.20  

The pace at which the UNGPs continue to be integrated into legal practice will likely depend on whether the rule of law can withstand this period of pressure. If courts, bar associations, and firms can resist political influence and maintain their independence, the progress made over the past fifteen years is likely to deepen and expand. Business clients still need solid legal advice on how to avoid involvement in human rights abuses, and there are now more compliance-driven reasons to seek such guidance. The need for wise counsel is only growing. In fact, the call for UNGP-aligned lawyering may have never been louder than it is now.

5. Future directions /

In the fifteen years since the UNGPs were endorsed, business law has significantly evolved. Bar associations now consider HRDD a standard part of professional practice. Tools like the IBA and ABA BHR guidance and the MCCs offer business lawyers practical ways to align advice, contracts, and governance with the UNGPs. Additionally, the UNGPs are effectively becoming mandatory law through legislation requiring HRDD.

While impressive, the integration of the UNGPs into legal practice was not inevitable. It happened because lawyers, bar associations, and institutions made deliberate choices to treat human rights as a professional concern rather than someone else’s problem. That same deliberate choice is now required again — but the stakes are higher. Attacks on judicial independence, bar association credibility, and the rule of law principles that underpin human rights protections are not abstractions. They directly threaten the scaffolding on which UNGP progress has been built.

Lawyers are not bystanders to these developments. They are among the most important actors in either resisting or accommodating them. Clients, too, have an interest: a weakened legal system serves neither their long-term interests nor those of the societies in which they operate. The UNGP framework calls on business lawyers to be more than technicians and this moment calls on lawyers to leave their so-called comfort zone. The rule of law needs defending, and lawyers are among the few who have both the tools and the obligation to do it.

*John F. Sherman, III is a member of the board of directors of The Responsible Contracting Lab, a New Jersey nonprofit corporation. He is the former general counsel and senior advisor to the Shift Project. Prior to that, he was a senior legal adviser to Professor John Ruggie and a core member of his UN mandate team. Before he joined Professor Ruggie’s team, he had many years of experience as a corporate lawyer.

Sarah Dadush is a Professor of Law and the Founding Director of the Responsible Contracting Project at Rutgers Law School. She chairs the board of The Responsible Contracting Lab and serves as a leading member of several working groups to develop UNGP-aligned contractual tools.

The views stated are those of the authors only and not necessarily those of any other persons or organizations.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions and insights of Caroline Rees, President, CEO, and

co-founder of Shift, and Meg Roggensack, Executive Director of the Business and Human Rights Lawyers Association.

1 See: Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Achieving Effective Internal Control over Sustainability Reporting (ICSR): Building Trust and Confidence through the COSO Internal Control—Integrated Framework (COSO/WBCSD 2023), https://www.coso.org/_files/ugd/3059fc_a3a66be7a48c47e1a285cef0b1f64c92.pdf

OECD, OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct (OECD Publishing 2018) 13–18 https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-due-diligence-guidance-for-responsible-business-conduct_15f5f4b3-en.html

2 See: Claire Tixeire, Cannelle Lavite and Anna Kiefer, ‘Lafarge on Trial: Cementing Accountability’, Opinio Juris (27 October 2025), http://opiniojuris.org/2025/10/27/lafarge-on-trial-cementing-accountability/; and

Chloé Dubois, ‘Lafarge: A Judicial Warning Still Largely Ignored by Business’, Justice Info (18 December 2025), https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/153748-lafarge-a-judicial-warning-still-largely-ignored-by-business.html.

3 See, e.g., Kishanthi Parella, ‘The Human Rights Obligations of Corporate Directors’ (2025) ___ UC Irvine Law Review ___ (February 25, 2026) (arguing that corporate involvement in human rights abuse often occurs because of explicit choices made by boards that often inevitably leads to human rights violations)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6304563

4 See UNHRC Res 48/13 ‘The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment’ (8 October 2021) UN Doc A/HRC/RES/48/13; UNGA Res 76/300 ‘The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment’ (28 July 2022) UN Doc A/RES/76/300 (together recognizing, for the first time at UN level, a universal human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment).

5 See, Sarah Dadush, The Law of Identity Harm, 96 WASH. U. L. REV. 803 (2019) (explaining “identity harm” as the anguish experienced by consumers who learn that they have been deceived about the virtuous–e.g., eco, fair-trade, conflict-free–attributes of a purchase and operationalizing it in tort, contract, and consumer protection law); and

International Bar Association, ‘ESG: Courts Weigh In as Crackdown on Greenwashing Claims Continues’ (5 March 2025) https://lawreview.wlulaw.wlu.edu/disclosure-greenwashing-and-the-future-of-esg-litigation/ (noting over 2,000 companies implicated in greenwashing incidents and a surge in “climate-washing” cases globally).

6 See Richard M Locke, The Promise and Limits of Private Power: Promoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy (Cambridge University Press 2013); https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/promise-and-limits-of-private-power/27BA4A65BC48CA059DE12FD643BD7905

7 John Gerard Ruggie, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights  (W W Norton 2013) ch 4, 81–84 (discussing corporate lawyers as key actors in the business and human rights debate).

8 Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, ‘ A United Nations Proposal Defining Corporate Social Responsibility for Human Rights’ (Client Memorandum, 1 May 2008) https://theliptonarchive.org/wp-content/uploads/545-A-United-Nations-Proposal-Defining-Corporate-Social-Responsibility-For-Human-Rights-dated-May-1-2008.pdf

9 Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, ‘Guiding Corporate Social Responsibility: A United Nations Blueprint to Promote Human Rights’ (Client Memorandum, 24 November 2010) https://theliptonarchive.org/wp-content/uploads/578-Guiding-Corporate-Social-Responsibility-A-United-Nations-Blueprint-to-Promote-Human-Rights-dated-November-24-2010.pdf

10 Shift and Mazars, UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework with Implementation Guidance (
Shift Project and Mazars 2015) (explaining the concept of salient human rights impacts) https://www.ungpreporting.org/framework-guidance/

11 John F. Sherman III, ‘Human Rights Due Diligence and Corporate Governance’ in Corinne Lewis and Constance Z Wagner (eds), A Guide to Human Rights Due Diligence for Lawyers (American Bar Association 2023)—a prior version of this chapter appears as a Harvard Kennedy School CSR Working Paper at www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/CRI_WP_79_Final.pdf

12 See: International Bar Association, IBA Practical Guide on Business and Human Rights for Business Lawyers (IBA 2016) 5–7https://www.ibanet.org/MediaHandler?id=d6306c84-e2f8-4c82-a86f-93940d6736c4  (explaining how the UNGPs apply to business lawyers and to law firms as business enterprises with their own responsibility to respect human rights); and International Bar Association, 
Updated IBA Guidance Note on Business and Human Rights: The Role of Lawyers in the Changing Landscape (IBA 2023) 3–6 www.ibanet.org/document?id=English-Updated-IBA-Guidance-Note-on-Business-and-Human-Rights-role-of-lawyers-apr-23 (reaffirming that law firms themselves have a responsibility to respect human rights and setting out expectations for integrating UNGP-style human rights due diligence into legal practice).

13 American Bar Association, ‘Resolution 604: Business and Human Rights’ (adopted by the House of Delegates, August 2024) https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ABA-Resolution-Oct-2024.pdf.

14 See: David V. Snyder, Susan A. Maslow & Sarah Dadush, Balancing Buyer and Supplier Responsibilities: Model Contract Clauses to Protect Workers in International Supply chains, Version 2.0, 77 Bus. Law. 115 (Winter 2021-2022). For the entire MCC toolkit, including the Buyer Code, see https://www.responsiblecontracting.org/mccs2-0;

15 See Shift Statement on the political agreement on the Omnibus Simplification Package on EU Sustainability due diligence and reporting rules (December 2025), https://shiftproject.org/shift-statement-on-the-political-agreement-on-the-omnibus-simplification-package-on-eu-sustainability-due-diligence-and-reporting-rules/.

16 See Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive Articles 10, 11, and 12, supported by Recitals 45, 54, and 66.

17 RCP Policy Brief: Forced Labour Trade Bans and HRDD: Why Responsible Contracting Matters
(February 2025), https://www.responsiblecontracting.org/flb-rcp-brief

18 United Nations Security Council, Report of the Secretary-General, The rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies, S/2004/616 p. 4 (2004), available at digitallibrary.un.org/record/527647?ln=en&v=pdf (setting forth former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan’s definition that the Rule of Law must be “consistent with international human rights norms and standards”, a view which UN policy documents, reports, and resolutions endorse; see United Nations and the Rule of Law, What is the Rule of Law? www.un.org/ruleoflaw/what-is-the-rule-of-law-archived/ (no date)).

19 IBA 2016 Guidance (n 12) at pp. 7-8, 9-12, 27-29 and IBA 2023 Updated Guidance (n. 12) at pars 29-32.

20 See: ABA and more than 50 bar associations, ‘Government Actions That Seek to Twist the Scales of Justice’ (Joint Statement, 26 March 2025) www.abajournal.com/news/article/aba-and-more-than-50-bar-associations-condemn-government-actions-that-seek-to-twist-the-scales-of-justice(pledging to ‘defend the rule of law and reject efforts to undermine the courts and the legal profession’ and rejecting the notion that the US government may ‘punish lawyers and law firms who represent certain clients’ or ‘punish judges who rule certain ways’); and

John Sherman, Bennett Freeman, Errol Mendes, and Kernaghan Webb ‘Attacks on the Rule of Law and the Threat to Business and Human Rights’ , IBA Business and Human Rights Committee (21 November 2025) www.ibanet.org/attacks-on-rule-of-law-and-the-threat-to-business-human-rights(warning that recent ‘attacks by the US administration on the judiciary, the legal profession, and the media – each a vital pillar of democracy – have created a ‘chilling effect’ and calling on the United States to uphold democracy and the rule of law).”

Dr. Christine Chow /

Board Member

She/Her

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Dr. Christine Chow has more than 25 years’ experience in investment management spanning sustainable investment, corporate governance, technology and AI.

She has held senior leadership roles at UBS Asset Management, HSBC Asset Management and Federated Hermes, where she led global stewardship, thematic research, responsible investment and engagement with companies on sustainability and governance issues. She was the human rights engagement lead at Federated Hermes, where she pioneered its approach to global value chain engagement with electronics companies, and advocated for provenance and traceability of critical minerals.

Christine served as Managing Director at UBS Asset Management, leading on global stewardship, thematic research and impact engagement. Previously, she was Global Head of Stewardship and a board member of HSBC Asset Management UK Limited, and Head of Asia and Global Technology at Federated Hermes EOS. From 2019 to 2025, she served as a board member and then Chair of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN), a global investor-led organisation representing around US$100 trillion in assets under management across more than 40 countries.

Christine is recognised internationally for her work on responsible investment, AI governance and corporate stewardship. She has published influential work on responsible AI and data governance and was a member of the UK Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence, serving on its Data Governance Task Force. She is the Appointed Advisor of AFRC in Hong Kong, the independent regulator of the accounting profession, and Emeritus Governor of the London School of Economics. Her PhD research on responsible investment was shortlisted for a United Nations award recognising industry relevance and academic excellence.

David Vermijs /

Director

He/Him Amsterdam

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As Director, David engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

Specializes in Business Enterprises

As Director, David engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

David has over a decade of experience advising multinational corporations, governments, NGOs and others on business and human rights. Prior to joining Shift, David provided research assistance to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for business and human rights John Ruggie. As part of his contributions, David field-tested human rights due diligence with a group of Dutch companies and their stakeholders, and he supported research on company-led grievance mechanisms.

From 2008 to 2010, David was the lead consultant on an 18-month project, the Business and Human Rights Initiative, under the umbrella of the Global Compact Network Netherlands. The initiative was a collaboration between 10 Dutch multinationals – ABN AMRO, AkzoNobel, Essent, KLM, Philips, Rabobank, Randstad, Shell, TNT and Unilever – and led to the publication of a ground-breaking business guidance tool, How to Do Business with Respect for Human Rights, in 2010. Through his work at Shift, David led the update of this publication from 2014 to 2016 with the support of the Dutch government under their National Action Plan on implementing the Guiding Principles.

Another major guidance tool David has helped develop addresses due diligence on child labor, published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organisation of Employers (IOE) in 2015. The guidance was the result of a multi-year, multi-stakeholder, multi-country project led by David involving the ILO, IOE, companies, unions, NGOs and other stakeholders.

David was previously a Research Fellow at the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, including assisting in teaching on business and human rights, global governance, corporate governance and leadership. David sits in a personal capacity on the board of the Dutch Social and Economic Council International Corporate Social Responsibility Committee. He has a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Arts in Business from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. David is a Dutch national, speaks English and Dutch and is proficient in Spanish and German.

Anna Triponel /

Senior Associate

She/Her London

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As a Senior Associate with Shift, Anna advises companies, lawyers, investors and business associations on how to put the Guiding Principles into practice.

As a Senior Associate with Shift, Anna advises companies, investors and business associations on how to put the Guiding Principles into practice. Trained as a lawyer, Anna focuses particularly on working with legal professionals on their role in implementing the Guiding Principles and has led work on analyzing regulations in various jurisdictions and how they align to the Guiding Principles. She also has particular expertise on the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework. 

Prior to joining Shift, Anna provided input to the work of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for business and human rights John Ruggie as a legal consultant. During this period, Anna also opened the New York office of the Public International Law & Policy Group, where she advised government officials, opposition leaders, human rights victims and civil society organizations on human rights, constitutional reform and transitional justice in Burma, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Somaliland, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Anna was previously a mergers and acquisitions associate at the law firm of Jones Day in New York, where she advised a broad range of multinational companies on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, joint venture, private equity and venture capital transactions. She founded and led the law firm’s International Law Pro Bono Group. She began her career as an advisor to the World Bank, advising on development governance structures to better meet the Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal primary education.

Anna is a (non-practicing) lawyer qualified in New York, England & Wales and France. She is a frequent expert speaker and writer on business and human rights and is the recipient of various professional awards, including the Empire State Counsel Award for changing the lives of those unable to afford counsel and the Seymour-Reuben Award for shaping international law. Anna has a Masters in International Law from American University Washington College of Law and a degree in common and civil law from the University of Paris X. She has been awarded the Business Sustainability Management certificate from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and the MBA Essentials certificate from London School of Economics (LSE). Anna is a British and French national and speaks English and French.

Martyn Platt /

Head of Human Resources

He/Him

As Head of Human Resources, Martyn leads Shift’s global people strategy and oversees all aspects of HR across the organization.

As Head of Human Resources, Martyn leads Shift’s global people strategy and oversees all aspects of HR across the organization. He ensures that Shift’s systems, policies and practices foster a thriving, inclusive and values-driven culture that supports our mission to embed respect for people’s dignity at the core of business practice.

Martyn brings over a decade of HR leadership experience across mission-driven and international organizations working at the intersection of business and society. Prior to joining Shift, he was Director of People Development & Culture at the PRI and earlier worked with Business in the Community. In these roles, he developed and embedded HR business partnering models, guided the organizations through significant growth and transformation, and partnered with senior leaders to design and implement people strategies that supported the delivery of their mission. Most recently, he served as a consultant with the WeProtect Global Alliance, where he supported the establishment of their HR function.

He is a Chartered Member of the CIPD and holds a Level 7 Diploma in Human Resource Management, as well as an ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching and Mentoring, reflecting his strong focus on leadership development and coaching. Martyn studied German and International Relations at the University of Exeter, including a year at the University of Würzburg in Germany. He later worked on education projects in Nicaragua, strengthening his global outlook and commitment to people-centred change.

Martyn is based in the United Kingdom.

Brianna Peterson /

Senior Advisor

She/Her Rome

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As a Senior Advisor at Shift, Brianna advises financial institutions and companies on how to put the UNGPs into practice, with a particular focus on the nexus between human rights and climate change.

Specializes in Financial Institutions

As a Senior Advisor at Shift, Brianna advises financial institutions and companies on how to put the UNGPs into practice, with a particular focus on the nexus between human rights and climate change. Brianna combines environment and climate change expertise with experience developing and implementing human rights policies, due diligence approaches and sustainability reporting.

Before Shift, Brianna spearheaded innovative sustainability initiatives at Sustainable Development Technology Canada and Export Development Canada (EDC). At EDC she led the development and implementation of exciting new portfolio approaches for climate change and human rights risk management, as well as aligning EDC’s corporate reporting with international reporting frameworks, such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the UNGPs Reporting Framework.  She also led EDC’s international sustainability negotiations and engagements, including as co-Chair of the Equator Principles Climate Change Working Group.

Prior to joining EDC, Brianna worked for nine years as a diplomat with Canada’s foreign ministry, including four years at the United Nations General Assembly where she led environment and development negotiations, advocacy and outreach on behalf of the Government of Canada, including for the creation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Brianna has also advised international financial institutions including the World Bank Group, institutional investors, bilateral development agencies, and small- and medium-sized enterprises on the practical application of environment, climate change, human rights standards.

Brianna has an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Queen’s University and a Master’s degree in Environmental Change & Management from the University of Oxford.

Ashleigh Owens /

Director | Financial Institutions Lead

She/Her New York City

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As Shift’s Director / Financial Institutions Lead, Ashleigh leads our work with financial institutions and supports other partners across industries, leveraging her breadth of experience to tackle cutting-edge issues and entrenched challenges on the road to implementation of the UN Guiding Principles.

Specializes in Financial Institutions | Valuing Respect

As Director / Financial Institutions Lead, Ashleigh engages directly with financial institutions, companies and investors as they embed respect for human rights into their operations and business relationships. She also leads on pieces of research under our Valuing Respect Project, which is focused on developing better ways to evaluate business respect for human rights. Ashleigh has a breadth of experience approaching the Guiding Principles from business, legal and academic perspectives and brings a holistic view to Guiding Principles implementation.

Ashleigh was previously Executive Director at Ernst & Young’s Climate Change and Sustainability Services. At EY Japan, she led a team of consultants supporting policy-making, educational program and governance design, stakeholder dialogue and due diligence strategies for multinational and domestic companies across a variety of industries.  As founder of the EY Human Rights Network, she led the enhancement of EY’s human rights capabilities across EY’s global network. In her role she was a frequent speaker and moderator of dialogues at multi-stakeholder fora and functioned as a connector between civil society, government and corporate actors with a common goal of empowering business to respect rights.

From 2012 to 2014 she conducted research at the United Nations University in the field of Sustainability Science, specializing in business and human rights. She prepared research for the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights and spent time at the UN Global Compact New York and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Ashleigh later sat on the UN Global Compact’s Human Rights and Labour Working Group and drafted the Global Compact’s 2015 Guide on How to Develop a Human Rights Policy.

Ashleigh is a lawyer qualified in Australia and England & Wales and specialized in intellectual property law, labor law and public international law. She has advised governments and companies on state human rights obligations, companies on the nexus between bilateral investment treaties and human rights and fellow lawyers on integrating the Guiding Principles into legal advice. In 2007 she won the Intellectual Property Society of Australia & NZ prize.

Ashleigh has authored or contributed to a number of publications including: Business and Human Rights: Corporate Japan Rises to the Challenge (joint publication between EY Japan and Global Compact Network Japan), Corporate Social Responsibility Can Save Japan (Op-ed in Japan Times), Cumulative Human Rights Impacts (in UN Global Compact/ Maplecroft Business Dilemmas Forum) as well as several legal publications on intellectual property law in Australia and English translations of Japanese High Court judgments. She is also a member of the Advisory Board for the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)’s Division for Prosperity.

Ashleigh has degrees in Law and Asian Studies from the University of Western Australia, with studies also conducted at the University of Vienna and Sophia University in Japan. She has a Masters of Science in Sustainability from the United Nations University and has undertaken the institution’s Leadership for Sustainability program. Ashleigh is an Australian national, and is fluent in Japanese.

Rachel Davis /

Vice President and Co-Founder

She/Her Sydney

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As the Vice President and Co-Founder of Shift, Rachel helps shape our strategy and oversees a range of our collaborations with companies, governments, investors, civil society and other partners. Rachel is also responsible for driving our work on standards advocacy and with sports associations.

Specializes in Standard Setters | Sports and Human Rights

Rachel is one of Shift’s co-founders and has led work at Shift over the last decade on standard-setting, human rights and sports, financial institutions, conflict and international law.

As Vice President, Rachel shapes our strategy and oversees a range of our collaborations with companies, governments, investors, civil society and other partners. Rachel leads Shift’s work to influence standard-setters of all kinds to integrate the UN Guiding Principles into the rules that govern business, including engaging with governments and the European Union on mandatory human rights due diligence.

Rachel also has unique experience advising and leading efforts to drive respect for human rights into the operations of global sports governing bodies. Rachel was the Chair of FIFA’s independent Human Rights Advisory Board while it operated, between 2017 and 2021. She has advised the International Olympic Committee on human rights since 2018, including co-authoring recommendations for the IOC on a comprehensive human rights strategy with former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein.

Rachel has more than a decade of experience in implementing the Guiding Principles with a wide range of organizations, including public and private financial institutions and companies from diverse business sectors and geographies, and she frequently leads and facilitates engagements with senior audiences around the world. She is the co-author of the leading study of the costs of company-community conflict in the extractive sector.

Prior to co-founding Shift, Rachel was a senior legal advisor from 2006-2011 to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights, Harvard Professor John Ruggie. She played a pivotal role in the development of the Guiding Principles, advising on all aspects of the relationship between the Guiding Principles and national and international law.

Rachel is also a Senior Program Fellow with the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and has experience at the highest levels of the Australian legal system and internationally, having clerked at the High Court of Australia and at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She has a particular interest in Indigenous peoples’ rights, having advised the Australian Federal Attorney-General’s Department on Indigenous affairs and acted as Ruggie’s liaison with the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues during his UN mandate.

Rachel has a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School and Bachelors degrees in Law and Politics from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she also lectured and published in law. She is a (non-practicing) lawyer qualified in New South Wales.

Federico Burlon /

Director

He/Him London

As Director at Shift, Federico engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

Specializes in Business Enterprises

As Director at Shift, Federico engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

Prior to joining Shift, Federico was Head of Delivery at Impactt. Federico managed a portfolio of clients, supported by a team of consultants. He led human rights assessment and remediation projects in the construction, energy, food and shipbuilding industries. This resulted in positive outcomes such as the return of passports and reimbursement of recruitment fees to workers and the strengthening of companies’ employment practices. Federico led Impactt’s engagement with the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy in Qatar as external monitor of worker welfare in the construction of venues for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. He also developed Impactt’s Diagnostics community of practice, delivering for clients as well as building internal capacity to execute human rights assessments around the world, with a focus on worker voice.

Prior to Impactt, Federico was a Sustainability Manager at Tesco plc. He contributed to the roll out of Tesco’s ethical trading programme to the goods-not-for-resale value chain. Federico engaged with hundreds of product and services suppliers and internal purchasing and sourcing teams to raise awareness of human rights issues and to prioritise and address the findings from third-party social audits. He also worked on climate change to develop a roadmap to achieve Tesco’s carbon reduction commitments related to direct and supply chain emissions.

In prior roles, Federico worked with a variety of human rights organisations in the United Kingdom and United States.

Federico holds a MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Science and International Studies from Macalester College, with a focus on human rights law and international migration. He is a United World College Adriatic alumnus and is from Argentina.

Erika George /

Board Member

She/Her

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Erika George is Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah. She has conducted leading research and is a passionate advocate for women’s rights, children’s rights, gender equality and environmental justice. 

Professor Erika R. George is the Associate Dean for Equity, Justice, & Engagement, Professor of Law, and Ernest Haddad Faculty Scholar at Boston University School of Law and a leading expert in business and human rights.

Professor George is the author of “Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability” (Oxford University Press, 2021), which examines the evolution of demands for corporate responsibility to respect international human rights. She was a founding member of the editorial board of the Business and Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press) and since 2022  has served on the board of Shift. 

Before joining BU Law in 2024, Professor George spent over two decades at the University of Utah as the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law. She directed the Tanner Humanities Center for four years and worked to enhance engagement and expand and diversify audiences for public humanities programs during her tenure. She also advocated for academic freedom and the right to read. Along with the former poet laureate of Utah, she co-founded the PEN America Utah Chapter to protect access to information and prevent censorship. 

Professor George is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an American Bar Foundation fellow, a trustee of Earthjustice, and serves on the Executive Board of the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights.

She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Society of American Law Teachers’ M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award and the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission Human Rights Award.

Professor George earned her BA with honors from the University of Chicago, a MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a JD from Harvard Law School. She also clerked for Judge William T. Hart of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. She was a litigation associate at the law firm of Jenner & Block in Chicago before joining Human Rights Watch as a research fellow.

We recorded an interview with Professor George when she joined Shift’s Board in February of 2022. It is available here.

Erika George is Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah. Prior to joining the University of Utah, Professor George served as a law clerk and litigation associate at prominent firms in both Illinois and New York. She also worked as a fellow and later consultant at Human Rights Watch, where she conducted investigations in South Africa on women’s rights, children’s rights, violence, the right to education and abuses related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She wrote a book-length report, Scared at School: Sexual Violence Against Girls in South African Schools, which received widespread media coverage in South Africa and internationally. She currently serves as special counsel to the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

Her scholarship has appeared in the California Law Review, the Michigan Journal of International Law, the New York University Journal of International Law and Policy, and the annual proceedings of the American Society of International Law.

Professor George has served on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Department of State Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan and as a member of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah. She is an Editor for the blog globaljusticeblog.com.

We recorded an interview with Professor George when she joined Shift’s Board in February of 2022. It is available here.

John Ruggie /

Founding Chair / In Memoriam

John Ruggie is the author of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

In Memory of John Ruggie

John served as the founding Chair of Shift from 2011 to 2021. He was the Berthold Beitz Research Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also taught at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California, and at Columbia University where he became Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. From 1997-2001 John served as UN Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning in the cabinet of Kofi Annan; from 2002-2005 as Special Advisor to the Secretary-General for the Global Compact; and from 2005-2011 as Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he received numerous awards from academic and professional societies for his contributions to social science, public policy and the development of international law. In addition to serving as Shift’s Board Chairman, John was also on the Board of Arabesque Asset Management Holding Company as well as Unilever’s Sustainability Advisory Council. His book, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

Caroline Rees /

President and Co-Founder

She/Her New York City

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As Shift’s President, Caroline leads our strategic development and drives our thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing corporate respect for business and human rights.

As the President and Co-Founder of Shift, Caroline leads our organizational strategy and development and drives our thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing corporate respect for business and human rights. Caroline speaks extensively at events around the world and frequently facilitates dialogue and debate amongst companies, governments, investors and civil society. In recent years, Caroline has focused on improving corporate human rights reporting as a catalyst for better human rights risk management, and on improving the data and methods used in evaluating companies’ social performance as part of ESG (environmental, social and governance) analysis. She has written and spoken extensively on the relevance of business respect for human rights, and the UNGPs specifically, to movements that seek to advance sustainability, equality, ESG investing, stakeholder capitalism, and human and social capital.

Caroline previously spent 14 years with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. From 2003 to 2006 she led the UK’s human rights negotiating team at the UN and she ran the negotiations to establish the mandate of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights. The success of this initiative led to Professor John Ruggie’s appointment and from 2007-2011 Caroline was a lead advisor on his team and deeply involved in the drafting of the Guiding Principles.

From 2009 to 2011 Caroline was also the Director of the Governance and Accountability Program at the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and she remains a Senior Program Fellow there. Caroline is a member of the Imperatives Board of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the Board of the Capitals Coalition, the Unilever Sustainability Advisory Council, and the Steering Committee of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures.

Caroline’s prior British foreign service career covered Iran, Slovakia, the UN Security Council in New York and the European Union in Brussels. Caroline has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Oxford University and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Caroline is a British national and speaks English, French and German.