Conference Political Expediency and International Criminal Tribunals - Nicholas Vetch

I've only been involved in human rights for three years. I am NOT a human rights professional. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an academic, and I'm certainly not very intellectual. But what I am is a businessman. And what struck me in the last three years is the sort of paucity of understanding of the impact that business has both in political and legal and human rights terms. I mean, I'm not sure I'm overstating it, I say that probably business is the most powerful force on the planet. And I will explain why I think that, and some of it is malign and some of it is helpful. I'm going to probably slap more towards the line today just because it's kind of more interesting. So there are kind of two strands I want to just explore with you. One is about the influence that business has on politics throughout the world. Many of you will be familiar with these countries. There are countries where essentially there has been state capture by business interests. I was in Guatemala last year on human rights rather than on business. It's a long history, but for those who are not familiar, it's a small coterie of businessmen had captured the country, enforce their will through private armies essentially, and the government is nothing more than a puppet government. And there are others which you will know about, like Iran. I think you could argue that it's pretty close to state capture there. The Revolutionary Guard is much more than just a kind of military outfit; it owns most of, not all but a very significant tranche of the business interests and the business resources in Iran, and a lot of the political stuff that it does is actually about protecting that. What may not be so apparent and may not be so well understood is the power and proximity of business to politics in countries that we would all consider to be largely democratic: the UK, France, and most notably the US. I'm sort of curious about five years ago because I've been reading about sort of cash for honours, so I wanted to see how far you can actually get. So I joined the Conservative Party and I gave them really quite a small amount of money which wouldn't really be able to buy you a lot of influence. And then I wanted to see how far I could get with this. Well, the truth is, within two weeks I found myself in a lunch with two cabinet ministers for really a very small amount of money. Now, it may be that they kind of thought that I had given some more. I'm not really suggesting that they were kind of opening themselves up to influence, but I do sort of have a hunch that proximity to power gives you influence; it just must do so.

If you extrapolate that several thousand times more and you look at what, for instance, is happening in the US in the 2016 presidential election. The Koch brothers, who are a thoroughly unpleasant pair of far-right conservatives and everything that we probably all feel were not appropriate attributes to be close to the political center of the United States, gave a hundred million dollars to various conservative groups. Robert Mercer, who is the president of a think tank, or Renaissance Technologies, he's essentially a kind of glorified hedge fund, funded Breitbart and, more importantly, was the backer and the funder of Steve Bannon. And the question we have to ask ourselves is: without Steve Bannon, could Donald Trump have won the nomination and won the presidential election? Well, we'll never know the answer, but I can tell you that without Mercer's money and without Bannon's backing, Trump's chances were significantly reduced, let alone the sort of interference from Russia. So now we find ourselves with a president in the White House who I have every confidence will, in the goodness of time, history will relate that he and his family are proximate to ostensibly a criminal enterprise. And I quote the Washington Post: 'No serious presidential candidate has ever had Trump's depth of documented business relationships with mob-controlled entities.' This is the man who did business with the mob, and he doesn't deny it; he acknowledges it. And what does he actually say about it? Trump's response was: 'Well, they were very good builders.' I suspect that some business control of at least parts of the US political system draws that country dangerously close to state capture. And those people who have funded this, the businessmen who have funded this, I can assure you have scant interest in justice, in the rule of law, and human rights. The compounding danger is that Trump and his associates have endorsed quite strongly, in some cases, some of the most unsavory leaders on our planet, encouraging people like Duterte and al-Sisi and others. And presumably this can have nothing but a negative effect on impunity. Indeed, as with the number two actually at Soros of organized... and George Soros is absolutely convinced that the increase in rhetoric and aggression from Viktor Orbán in Hungary is directly linked to license ostensibly from the White House. So this has real impact on the world that all of you are trying to combat. And the source of it is money, and money from business.

The second strand that I want to talk about is the power of corporates in terms of how they control information, not just political influence but information, and how they control all of us. Just to give you the size and the sense of scale of what we're faced with: the MSCI World Index, that's just Morgan Stanley's world global index which tracks the share price of the top 1600 companies in the world, estimates that the market capitalization, so the global value of these companies, is 36 trillion dollars. Just to give you an idea, the US debt is 16 trillion, and that is just one. So this is more than double. And what's interesting about these companies is not that they are almost uniquely technology companies; they aren't all technology companies, but a lot of them are, including Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. But it is their relative newness; many of them having been created in the last 15 or 20 years, these companies have global markets, they have no capital constraints, and therefore you can safely assume that we will see the first trillion-dollar company in the not-too-distant future. And what's important about these companies, not just about their size, but it is about the fact that they control the modern means of production, which in today's world essentially means information. And the phenomenon is not confined to the US or the Western world. The so-called BAT companies—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—practically run the Chinese internet and control a significant flow of information. And what makes it so powerful is that they monopolize information and access to information on a globalized scale. Almost every other business and organization is interlocked and dependent on these colossi. Just to give you an idea on a more parochial level: when I founded my business in the late... we spent 90% of our advertising budget on old media outlets—radio, newspapers, TV, and so on. 20 years later, we spend 90% of it on our digital platform, and 90% of that, so 80% roughly of our total spend, with two companies: Google and Facebook. And the fact is they hold complete power over us. If they want to change the rules of engagement or indeed the price, we have no choice but to comply. And in the past, when similar monopolies occurred, governments had the power to regulate. So in 1911, the US Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller's oil vehicle, was an illegal monopoly and ordered its breakup. And indeed, component bits of it still exist today, including ExxonMobil. So the question is: are our governments powerful enough to combat the insidious, new monopolistic, octopus-like power of these new large technology companies? I have some very significant doubts about that for a number of reasons. But in a sense, the proof is in the pudding. The European antitrust officials led by Margrethe Vestager have recently fined Google 2.4 billion euros for illegally preferring its own services over others. But quite frankly, it's a drop in the ocean and will have no impact at all on them. And this follows a seven-year investigation. The ruling was made about 18 months ago, and all they did was kind of move their service provision around to get around the rules. Now they'll have to face another antitrust investigation. The salient point that I'm trying to make is that it's almost impossible in such a fast-moving technological environment for governments to keep up with it. And then I'm afraid to say that to add to this, we all of us in this room as consumers aid and abet this process. Their source of power is information, and we willingly trade that in an unalloyed trade of convenience over privacy. This information about us has always been out there, it's always been available, but I think about it in terms of each one of us having a small collection of books about us, and those books have been scattered around the kind of world-size library. And so just by dint of the amount of information that was out there, nobody could actually access anything very interesting about us individually until recently. But because we made this kind of Faustian pact, those books now sit nicely and neatly on one shelf and are completely accessible by these technology companies. And the power that we have given them is, in my view, quite extraordinary.

And so where is this leading? I give you a quote: 'This is not a government of the people, by the people, for the people any longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.' Now you see that quote is not a modern quote. It comes from President Rutherford Hayes, who is one of those complete non-entities between Lincoln and Roosevelt, in 1888. But the difference is that they were able to break the power of these large corporations. And now I'm afraid to say I do not believe that regulation is sufficient to force the curbing of the worst excesses of these companies or indeed to impose on them some kind of positive action and make them good corporate citizens. In essence, no legal framework, I believe, because it is by definition reactive, can keep up with the pace of change of technology. However, we do have a trump card, I think, in that the real power that we have is as consumers and as employees. And this is never more appropriate and relevant in an age of what I call radical transparency. What I mean by that is that there is no action, there is no change, there is no policy or behavior that is now not scrutinized through seemingly endless channels of social media. There is literally no place to hide. The important point is that the consumer is everyone. Everyone includes employees. And although trade unions hold some residual power, a much more effective balancer of power is actually us as consumers and employees, for the simple reason that in a globalized world, whereas employee power wanes in a globalized world where trade unions are bound by national borders to a large extent, employees and consumers are endlessly mobile and know no boundaries. The multiplier effect of radical transparency means influence can be exerted on companies everywhere and anywhere and anytime. 'The toughest penalties that companies face for breaching social responsibility are in the court of public opinion. On Friday afternoons we think about corporate social responsibility for half an hour.' This is a quote from Howard Davies, who was the head of the CBI, which is a collective business organization in the UK. All public companies in most jurisdictions in Europe and North America at least are required to produce audited corporate social responsibility statements. It's a classic of regulation that allows companies to produce pages of worthy documentation most of which means absolutely nothing, whilst in fact doing precisely nothing. Apart from commitments under specific bits of legislation are mostly just words. So if you've read the statements by most companies, for instance under the UK's Modern Slavery Act, they are just that: completely meaningless. And the shroud or the screen is that as long as you put the statement out, actually what you do doesn't sort of terribly matter. So the regulation, whilst it exists, has no teeth in any shape or form. Since the Modern Slavery Act was introduced in the UK in 2015, there have only been 63 prosecutions; I was astonished. The toughest penalty that companies face for breaching anti-slavery legislation is in the court of public opinion. So as long as there is enough public scrutiny, the business of social responsibility and, more specifically, human rights is real business for businesses.

Interestingly, the owners of these businesses may be more advanced in their thinking than the managers. It's worth pointing out that publicly traded companies, and even a large portion of privately owned ones, are owned by us, the public and the consumer. So what can we do to harness the very considerable power and wealth of the corporate world to effect improvements in human rights? In my view, it's about education, it's about mobilisation, and it is about familiarisation, as well as the stick of the law and regulation. Similarly, wearing my human rights hat—it's a new one—we need to make common interests with business and business leaders. And this is important because in political circles and indeed within the human rights community, particularly since the financial crisis, there has been business being treated as something of a pariah. Now, there may in some instances be good reasons why that is right and just, but of course it's probably not very helpful in trying to persuade business and business leaders to come to our assistance. We need to understand the motives behind business and its methods and channel that where we can, whilst of course robustly challenging where wrong is perpetrated. And I'll just leave you with a quote from Aidan McQuade, who is director of Anti-Slavery International: 'Governments will pay attention to business in a way they won't to human rights organizations.' This is a powerful force, and we need to engage with it, we need to harness it to our advantage, whilst of course being completely alive to all its laws and banes.