Caroline Rees
United Kingdom
Expertise:
Business & Industry
Human Rights
Co-Founder, President and CEO
Caroline Rees is the president and co-founder of Shift, a nonprofit organization working with companies, financial institutions and standard-setters to make respect for human rights integral to how business gets done. Rees leads Shift’s organizational strategy and thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing corporate respect for business and human rights. Rees speaks extensively at events around the world and frequently facilitates dialogue and debate among companies, governments, investors and civil society.
In recent years, Rees has focused on corporate reporting as a catalyst for better human rights risk management, and on improving the data and methods used in evaluating companies’ social performance as part of environmental, social and governance (ESG) analysis. She has written and spoken extensively on the relevance of business respect for human rights—and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) specifically—to movements that seek to advance sustainability, equality, ESG investing, stakeholder capitalism, and human and social capital.
Rees spent 14 years with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. From 2003 to 2006 she led the UK's human rights negotiating team at the United Nations, and she ran the negotiations to establish the mandate of the special representative of the UN secretary general on business and human rights. The success of this initiative led to Professor John Ruggie’s appointment, and from 2007 to 2011 Rees was a lead advisor on his team and deeply involved in the drafting of the Guiding Principles.
From 2009 to 2011, Rees was the director of the Governance and Accountability Program at the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, where she remains a senior program fellow. Rees is a commissioner on the Business Commission to Tackle Inequality, a member of the advisory committee to the Investor Alliance on Human Rights, the advisory group to the Workforce Disclosure Initiative, the advisory council to Harvard Business School’s Impact Weighted Accounts Initiative and the advisory panel of the Capitals Coalition.
Rees’ British foreign service career covered Iran, Slovakia, the UN Security Council and the European Union. Rees has a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford University and a Master of Arts in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.