Bennett Freeman
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Bennett Freeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thank you.
Thank you, Richard.
It's a pleasure to join you again.
You know, Richard, we've seen progress, significant progress in the business and human rights world over the last quarter century on both sides of the Atlantic and indeed around the world, including in the United States.
That progress has been significant, positive overall, of course, also inconsistent, incomplete, and in places and at times, frankly, inadequate.
But nonetheless, there is now a serious threat to not only continuing the progress, but even maintaining the gains that have been made by companies together with investors, NGOs, and the US government over the years.
And those threats really are apparent both on the geopolitical stage, and I have to say, unfortunately,
also on the domestic political stage here in the United States.
And it became apparent to the Center and to me and to others immediately after the presidential election in November 2024 that there was a severe challenge to maintaining this progress.
And we've seen this on other fronts, on climate,
on diversity, but an acute challenge to maintaining progress in business and human rights, hence this initiative undertaken by the Center that Chloe is so capably leading.
Yeah.
So the initial research and the findings issued in mid-November painted a largely positive picture of companies mostly maintaining their longstanding policy commitments related to human rights.
uh and this time the approach has been a little more sophisticated just given um the the greater capability now to undertake the the research the the greater time to really drill down on capacity and you know for all of the importance of policy commitments and i say this as somebody who's been in the policy commitment and standard setting business for quarter century related to human rights
You know, it's great, but it's not good enough if there's not a capacity to implement the commitments.
Frankly, the policies are worthless.
They're useless if the implementation capacity is cut or let alone gutted.
So that's really one of the sharp findings in this new round here.
And I just want to emphasize also part of the intent.
Part of the intent here is to encourage, encourage companies to stay the course and to recognize that so many of these 54 companies and so many others have been
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