Amal at SAPAriba summit in Barcelona

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JUNE 4, 2019 / 10:53 PM / UPDATED 32 MINUTES AGO

Amal Clooney advises companies to step up human rights to profit

Megan Rowling, Thomson Reuters Foundation

RCELONA, June 4 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Companies need to put respect for human rights at the core of their businesses, with “doing good” likely to become a longer-lasting trend if they see it as a way to boost profits, international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney said on Tuesday.

Clooney, a British-Lebanese barrister, said companies were having to respond “in real-time” to events involving human rights abuses and were increasingly being held accountable for this.

She cited the example of foreign companies pulling out of an investment conference in Saudi Arabia after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at its Istanbul consulate last October.

Corporations are held accountable today by their employees, shareholders, clients and the public, she noted.

“All businesses are in a position where if they don’t act, they will be judged by those communities,” Clooney told a conference hosted by global procurement platform SAP Ariba.

“Business professionals and people in the West with democracies often think human rights are about someone else, someone who lives far away and isn’t really like them at all - and that’s actually not true.”

Clooney highlighted attacks on the rights of women in many countries, including sexual violence “of epidemic proportions”, from Asia to Africa and the Middle East, as well as persecution of LGBT+ people, and repression of journalists around the world.

Clooney is currently working on cases to prosecute Islamic State militants for crimes against humanity, including sexual abuse and enslavement of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority.

The lawyer, who married Hollywood actor George Clooney in 2014, acknowledged that doing the right thing may not always be profitable in the short-term.

She recalled a meeting with former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan where he asked major pharmaceutical firms to cut the price of medicines to make them affordable for the poor.

But recruiting and promoting a more diverse workforce, including women, will likely boost the bottom line, because it is a question of attracting the best talent, she said.

"Ultimately if businesses believe that doing good can be profitable, then doing good will be sustainable," she said. (Reporting by Megan Rowling @meganrowling; editing by Belinda Goldsmith Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking and property rights. Visit news.trust.org/climate)

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[size=34]Amal Clooney discusses how technology companies can be used to promote human rights as she takes to the stage at live event in Barcelona[/size]

By REBECCA DAVISON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 06:41 EDT, 5 June 2019 | UPDATED: 06:55 EDT, 5 June 2019

     



Amal Clooney took to the stage at the SAP Ariba Live conference in Barcelona on Tuesday to discuss how technology companies can promote human rights. 
According to Computer Weekly, the human rights lawyer, 41, specifically urged technologists to look at how they can solve world issues. 
She discussed how facial recognition technology, for example, offers amazing benefits for society by governments who want to track dissidents. 
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Wisdom: Amal Clooney discussed how technology companies can be used to promote human rights as she took to the stage at the SAP Ariba live event in Barcelona on Tuesday
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Notes: The human rights lawyer, 41, specifically urged technologists to look at how they can solve world issues
Amal is a senior advisor to the UN and the United Kingdom attorney general’s expert on public international law.



SAP Ariba's website wrote that, she discussed her focus on 'humanitarian efforts and the responsibility of today’s organizations and business leaders to increase diversity in supply chains, ensure supply chains are free from slavery and child labour, as well as safeguard principles of transparency and sustainability.'
The site adds that Amal addressed how, 'in a world of constant change and disruption, business leaders can support global issues and still be transformational and impactful.'
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What a CV: Amal is a senior advisor to the UN and the United Kingdom attorney general’s expert on public international law
She recalled a meeting she had previously had with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on day one of the three-day event. 
She said: 'Four years ago, my husband and I were at a meeting with Bill Gates, and Brad Smith [chief legal counsel at Microsoft] burst into the meeting and asked to speak to me. 
'He said that if I needed a tech solution for any of the issues we were working on, Microsoft would help.' 
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Passionate: Amal discussed her working relationship with Microsoft and how they were placed human monitors in court rooms globally, where there is a high risk of human rights abuse 
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Informative: Amal called upon businesses to step up when governments fail to do so
She noted that one of the applications developed by Microsoft enables court rooms to be monitored. 
She added: 'We have a programme to place human monitors in court rooms all over the world where there is a high risk of human rights abuse.'
The application developed by Microsoft gathers information in a way to create an injustice index of countries around the world.
[size=18]George Clooney offers chance to have date with his wife Amal




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She continued: 'I have these extraordinary meetings with 20 Microsoft engineers and I have no idea what they do, they have no idea what I do.
'But somehow we create this tool together and we are going to make it available the app store so that anybody in any community can make use of it.'
Amal called upon businesses to step up when governments fail to do so. 
She concluded: 'We want to harness people like you in this room to solve public sector problems. There is a great opportunity.' 
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She concluded: 'We want to harness people like you in this room to solve public sector problems. There is a great opportunity'