Archives: People

Alexandra Haas is the Executive Director of Oxfam Mexico. In 2020, she was a guest researcher at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas and advisor on gender and inclusion at the Coordinación de Difusión Cultural de la UNAM. She was President of the National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination (CONAPRED) for four years and prior to that she headed the political affairs area of the Mexican Embassy in Washington, DC.

Alexandra has participated in developing and implementing legislative and public policy initiatives with a human rights perspective in international organizations, government institutions and social organizations in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala and Argentina.

Alexandra has taught Human Rights and Democracy at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and she has taught International Law of Human Rights and Theory of Law at Universidad Iberoamericana and the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana. She is an associate of the International Human Rights Network.

John Knox is the Henry C. Lauerman Professor of International Law at Wake Forest University, where he has taught since 2006. From 2012 to 2015, he served as the first United Nations Independent Expert, and from 2015 to 2018, as the first Special Rapporteur, on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. In that role, he submitted a series of reports to the UN Human Rights Council on the application of human rights law to environmental issues, including climate change and the conservation of biological diversity. In 2018, he concluded his mandate by presenting Framework Principles on Human Rights and the Environment to the United Nations, and by calling upon the UN General Assembly to recognize the human right to a healthy and sustainable environment.

His recent scholarship has focused on issues arising at the intersection of human rights and environmental protection. In 2018, he published a co-edited volume of essays on the human right to a healthy environment, and he is currently writing a book on the evolution of environmental rights in international law.

John currently serves on the board of the Universal Rights Group, a human rights institution in Geneva, and on the board of Wake Forest University’s Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. Previously, he chaired a national advisory committee to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the first regional environmental organization in North America, and served as special counsel to the Center for International Environmental Law.

Prior to joining Wake Forest, John served as an attorney-adviser at the Department of State, worked in private practice in Austin, Texas, and taught at Pennsylvania State University.

CAROLINE REES | PRESIDENT AND CO-FOUNDER

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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 Commissioner on the Business Commission to Tackle Inequality, a member of the Advisory Committee of the Investor Alliance for Human Rights, the Advisory Group to the Workforce Disclosure Initiative, the Advisory Council to Harvard Business School’s Impact Weighted Accounts Initiative and the Advisory Panel of the Capitals Coalition.

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.

Before joining PwC in February 2021, Susanne Stormer was the Chief Sustainability Advisor and Vice President of Novo Nordisk, where she successfully embedded the Triple Bottom Line principle into business practice and spearheaded the company’s leadership in integrated reporting. Susanne is also a member of the Board of Governors of the International Corporate Governance Network, and a member of the Board of the Access to Nutrition Initiative. She was a member of the task force that developed the draft European Sustainability Reporting Standards and, until July 2022, was also a member of the SASB Standards Board. In addition, she is an adjunct professor of Corporate Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School and a visiting professor at UC Berkeley Haas.

Maria Anne van Dijk is an independent business and human rights strategist specializing in sustainable banking practices.

Maria Anne has worked in various roles in the financial services industry for over 30 years, focusing on sustainability for ABN AMRO Bank since 2003, including as Global Head of Environmental and Social Risk Advisory and Monitoring. In that role, she developed ABN AMRO’s human rights program, which became one of the pillars of the bank’s sustainability policy. She also pioneered an award-winning project with the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, the University of Amsterdam and the Public Prosecution office, which utilizes bank data to detect human trafficking activities.

Maria Anne is a member of the Netherlands Helsinki Committee and the Human Rights Committee of the Dutch Advisory Council on International Affairs (AIV). She co-authored Banks and Human Trafficking: Rethinking Human Rights Due Diligence.