Ms Mary Lawlor:

Referring back to the benchmark of companies, we obviously benchmark the biggest companies, many of which are multinationals. However, let us look at a company like Microsoft. I was part of its consultation on bringing in a ten-year human rights policy. It is deliberately and thoughtfully deciding that it must engage in proper due diligence and human rights impact assessment of its work. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that other companies would not be similarly willing to engage.

It is a case of such companies understanding what is involved and then changing their behaviour. As we have seen so often in the past, this is for no other reason than that they have been found guilty in awful circumstances. For example, Rana Plaza had to change its behaviour to protect its reputation.