Richard Howitt
speaker
582 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 29 Jul
Richard Howitt’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 — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Welcome to Frankly Speaking, the podcast on responsible business by FACBOLD, the European public interest law firm.
I'm Richard Howitt, and after many years leading responsible business issues in the European Parliament, I lead our discussions on the very latest developments in the fields of corporate sustainability, sustainable finance, business and human rights.
Today, companies and modern slavery.
What business can do to help combat issues such as child slavery, human trafficking and forced labour?
I'll ask one of the foremost experts in the field what have been the lessons of 10 years of modern slavery legislation and what is its relationship with company efforts on human rights due diligence?
That expert is Professor John Dumais, Professor in Accounting at Macquarie University, Sydney, winner of a Lifetime Award for being in the world's top 2% of scientists, and today joining us from Melbourne, Australia.
John, first time on Frankly Speaking, a very warm welcome.
Now, before we get on to modern slavery, I often ask my guests, how did you first get into sustainability or business and human rights in your career or even in your life?
How did it first happen for you?
Although due diligence might be relatively new to at least some companies, the modern slavery requirements on companies, legal requirements, date from 2015 in the UK, 2018 in Australia.
So we've got about a decade of experience.
Quite simply, have they worked?
The Australian Human Rights Commission did say it had some positive impact.
I think probably for the people that have campaigned around this, and we had Anthony Savory International in the earlier days of this podcast, to say that there's been no benefits is very, very hard.
Why did the Australian Human Rights Commission say there was some positive impact?
And so often in the business and human rights field, it stops for companies before you get to the victims.
And in this case, you know, victims are highly vulnerable.
What are some examples of things that companies can do to help and remediate for victims?
Yeah, and I noticed that International Shareholder Services, ISS, have launched a modern slavery scorecard, which rates companies on what they're doing about modern slavery in the supply chain.
uh and is designed to be used by investors really interesting interesting development now as i said at the start i also wanted to investigate the link between modern slavery and human rights due diligence are there some advantages in dealing with modern slavery as a standalone issue
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