This piece, written by Ethical Systems CEO Azish Filabi, was originally published on The FCPA Blog and is cross-posted here.

At the 2017 Global Ethics Summit, put on by the Ethisphere Institute, Caroline Rees of SHIFT spoke on a panel about business and human rights.

When asked about differences in stakeholder management approaches between European and U.S. businesses, and why U.S. companies are not as far along as their European counterparts, she highlighted that U.S. lawyers have a more dominant role. 

When business leaders want to audit their supply chain, for example, lawyers often warn against such initiatives in the absence of a regulatory mandate. But, as Rees discussed, the existence of human rights risk in your supply chain is not a secret -- it’s just a question of when and how it will be exposed.