Aligning Principle with Profit: Dr. Dorothée Baumann-Pauly on Business, Human Rights & Ethical Leadership
- Sorina I. Crisan, PhD
- 7 hours ago
- 22 min read
What is it like to help reshape global business practices to prioritize human rights? In this captivating interview, Dr. Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, Director of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights at the University of Geneva and Research Director at NYU Stern’s Center for Business and Human Rights, shares her journey as a passionate educator and advocate for ethical change. Renowned for her pioneering case studies on cobalt mining in the Congo, sustainability-linked loans in finance, and sustainable rubber sourcing in the Amazon, Baumann-Pauly offers a compelling roadmap for aligning profit with principle through responsible sourcing and human rights due diligence. “Facts need to be coupled with some storytelling to contextualize and make the facts more relatable,” she says, emphasizing that combining narrative with strategic alliances, such as engaging companies to advocate for human rights education, enhances persuasion and drives meaningful change. Her love for teaching shines as she inspires the next generation, noting that students and young professionals require “a clear moral compass and some moral courage to speak up for what matters.” Part of The Persuasive Discourse’s series “Educators: Academic, Non-Academic & Hybrid,” this conversation blends rigorous scholarship with practical insights, making it essential reading for aspiring leaders and advocates eager to build a just economy.
Interview by Sorina I. Crisan – Matthey de l’Endroit, PhD
Question 1: As Director of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights and Research Director at NYU Stern’s Center for Business and Human Rights, what does your current work entail, and what are the most pressing issues you’re addressing?
Answer: Thank you, Sorina, for having me. I’m involved with two institutions. Since 2013, I’ve been the Research Director at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and since 2019, I’ve been leading the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights. These are sister organizations with aligned missions to advance human rights in corporate practice.
Our work starts with rigorous research, which serves as the foundation for our advocacy agenda. Key themes right now include, for example: Just transition—how can we accelerate the transition and still responsibly source critical minerals from around the world? Labor migration: How can we ensure migrant workers are well protected? Or evergreen themes, such as child labor and forced labor. We started addressing these human rights challenges in business decades ago, but we haven’t moved the dial on these issues yet. Therefore, we need a better understanding of the root causes driving these problems in global supply chains.
Overall, we live in challenging times for human rights, and we need to find better ways to demonstrate to businesses that human rights make good business sense.
Question 2: How do you translate your research into practical impact?
Answer: I conduct research, and then I use the research findings as the basis for advocacy. I want to ensure that what we learn is put into practice.
Question 3: How does your background in business ethics shape your approach to business and human rights?
Answer: I have a PhD from the University of Zurich in economics with a focus on business ethics. I would say that business ethics is the big umbrella, but for the past 15 years, I’ve focused on the emerging field of business and human rights. The objective: to train the next generation in critical thinking. Ethics means to critically reflect on the morals of our time, stepping back to consider whether we’re on the right path and if this is the world and economy we want to live in.
A word on business and human rights—there are many terms floating around, like sustainability, corporate citizenship, and corporate social responsibility. I’ve spent time defining various terms in this field, but this is a very academic exercise, and in practice, it’s not what truly matters. The one distinction that matters to me is that my work focuses on core business operations, namely how companies make their money, not how they spend it.
Philanthropy and corporate social responsibility allow companies to continue with business as usual, and if the business generates enough profits, they have money left to address societally relevant concerns. In contrast, I am interested in how companies make their money and how to align business models with a commitment to respect human rights in core business operations.
Question 4: Why is it important for academics to connect research with practical outcomes?
Answer: That’s a good question because most academics focus on theory and do not fully tease out practical implications. Practical insights are often captured in a small paragraph at the end of their academic articles that focus on theory development or testing theory. I believe theory and practice belong together. After all, we are academics at public institutions paid by taxpayers’ money.
I think we have interesting things to say about the society and economy we live in. So, I feel there’s an obligation to use the rigorous analysis from our research to translate it into recommendations for companies and policymakers that can truly benefit from our insights.
That connection, I think, is really important. And again, we live in times where science doesn’t get a good reputation anymore, but I believe it’s absolutely foundational for making evidence-based decisions in corporations and at a policy-level.
Question 5: Can you point to a specific impact your work has had on corporate behavior?
Answer: That’s a really difficult question because it assumes I can draw a direct causal relationship between my research and a change in corporate behavior, and I cannot do that because, of course, I’m part of an ecosystem that works towards enhancing the maturity of certain issues and, taken together, we hopefully eventually reach a tipping point where companies and policy-makers can no longer deny certain facts and have to act. There are always many actors that drive such themes.
Over the past five years, I’ve focused on one research project that analyzes responsible sourcing strategies for cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Cobalt is a critical battery mineral needed to power electric vehicles, and the conditions of cobalt sourcing in the Congo are dire. Child labor is very common, and mining accidents happen all the time, including fatalities that are never reported. So, we have this tension between the need to accelerate the energy transition and, on the other hand, massive human rights abuses in mineral supply chains all over the world.
The premise of this research is that we need to transition to electric vehicles to meet climate change targets, and consequently, companies need help to figure out how to source critical battery minerals responsibly. In all my work, I aim to be solutions-oriented, trying to identify what could work in practice, from a human rights perspective, and for business. In the context of cobalt, I identified a solution for artisanal small-scale miners, whose cobalt production is not a side note to the cobalt supply chain in the DRC. They actually produce up to 30% of the cobalt in the DRC. In contrast to industrial mines, artisanal mines are smaller and informal with even greater human rights risks. Child labor and mining accidents are common.
With the help of my work, responsible sourcing standards were drafted, and those standards are now the foundation for a government agency called L’Entreprise Générale du Cobalt (EGC). That agency has had ups and downs over the past years, but right now, it looks like they want to take these responsible sourcing standards to scale at many other artisanal mines in the country. In the context of my work, I pushed hard for large mining companies to integrate those informal miners. There has recently been a policy change that clarifies a legal gray zone, allowing large industrial mines to integrate artisanal miners in collaboration with the state agency. So, there have been developments that make the solutions I identified in this specific context more likely for application.
Question 6: Why focus on cobalt sourcing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and what should we know about it?
Answer: About two-thirds of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country in the heart of Africa with over a hundred million people. It’s a very poor country, challenged by epidemics and conflict. Yet, its natural resources are critical for the energy transition, and these natural resources cannot be moved easily.
There is no other place in the world that could meet our cobalt demands. This is different from other industries I’ve worked on, like the global apparel supply chain, where, as soon as there are issues in one country, companies immediately check where else they could produce ready-made garments. For cobalt, these are natural resources that lie in the ground, and over half of the world’s cobalt resources are estimated to be in the Congo.
So, any company that needs critical battery minerals will eventually have to deal with the Congo, and that had a certain appeal to me—that companies cannot easily switch but actually need to figure out this really complicated business context in the Congo.
Question 7: How do your case studies illustrate practical solutions for integrating human rights into business operations?
Answer: The case studies are, for me, a way to illustrate what could work in the context of business and human rights—what approaches companies could apply to integrate human rights into core business operations. I think it’s most convincing if you have real companies and real issues to deal with. It’s important to me that these companies develop models that could be replicable and scalable.
I’m not interested in small pilot projects that only works in the context of, say, a Western democracy. I want to go to the hard places where companies have innovated business models and solutions that others can adopt as well. We have a series of case studies in different industry contexts, from finance and sustainability-linked loans to the cobalt work I just mentioned, focused on operational solutions for artisanal small-scale miners, understanding the huge impact this solution could have for estimated 40 million artisanal miners around the world.
We’ve also looked into diamond mining in Botswana, reflecting on the diamond supply chain, which has operated in a certain way for decades, if not centuries. Now, I think there’s a moment where we should step back and reflect: Isn’t there another way of doing this to ensure that the countries of origin, such as Botswana, truly benefit from their natural resources and we can overcome the pattern of ‘extractivism’ we’ve seen, particularly in African countries, for so long?
In the context of the apparel industry, our case study of Decathlon focuses on their purchasing practices, which they’ve applied to their global supply chain. It’s unusual in that the company makes long-term sourcing commitments—rare in the apparel industry—through strategic partners they engage with for five, ideally 10, or even 20 years. This long-term engagement gives the company a chance to truly work with those factories, enhancing their productivity, quality, and labor rights standards for workers in those factories.
This is just an overview of the various sectors we’ve covered through our case studies. I write them to capture what works, and I use them in my teaching to provide real examples and storytelling for students. They’re also used by other actors, including civil society organizations. I recently presented them to a group of civil society organizations that are part of OECD Watch, and they said that these examples are really useful for their work because, as they challenge companies, they often need to point to practices that have been put in place. For example, if a company says, “We cannot have full supply chain transparency,” they can point to cases and say, “Well, hang on, is that really true? Because we have examples of companies that have actually achieved full supply chain transparency.” So, it’s about debunking some of the myths and excuses that companies have used by providing a reference point that raises the bar.
Question 8: How do your case studies influence or inspire other companies?
Answer: I am hoping they’re inspirational for other companies. When I present these cases to companies, they’re really interested in hearing about these tried and tested solutions.
I think most people I meet who work for companies are very keen to be part of solutions. The question is, what do solutions look like? We’re at a point where there’s a principled agreement that companies shouldn’t harm people, and the question is how to put this into practice.
So, more guidance on the “how”—on the actual implementation—is what companies are craving.
Question 9: Can you describe some specific case studies and the companies involved?
Answer: We’ve done work on strategic long-term partnerships with Decathlon. The sustainability-linked loans in the finance context were an example by ABN AMRO, which is now being scaled by other banks.
We have worked with a small company in the diamond mining context called HB Antwerp and HB Botswana. In the context of cobalt sourcing from the Congo, this was a pilot initiated by a Swiss commodity trading company, Trafigura, which is now being looked at through the state agency and other commodity trading companies that would like to replicate it.
One case study I haven’t mentioned yet referred to sustainable rubber sourcing from the Amazon in Brazil through a company called VEJA, a French sneaker company that produces the soles of their shoes with 40% rubber from the Amazon, sourced in a way that empowers local communities who live in the Amazon Forest and also has built-in financial incentives to slow down deforestation.
Question 10: What does it mean to align profits and principles in your case studies?
Answer: As you can imagine, writing these cases takes time because we have to build trust with the companies to do the investigation. I’m not going to talk about any cases I dropped where I decided this is not a model that is scalable or that’s just not at the level I want for a threshold that companies should meet.
But the ones we featured—I’m not endorsing the company as a whole, but I think they have engaged in business practices that are interesting enough and point in the right direction for what we call aligning profits and principles. How can we support successful businesses to conduct business in a way that is respectful of human rights?
That’s what I mean by aligning profits and principles.
Question 11: What is the process for developing these case studies, and how do you ensure their reliability?
Answer: Writing these case studies is not a quick process. As I said before, it takes quite some time to first identify a potential candidate, then learn enough about the company and their business practices to have some confidence that it’s worth going deeper. Reaching out to the company to have a first set of conversations and getting approval to do more is a significant step.
I absolutely believe you have to go and see with your own eyes. Interviews with headquarters won’t cut it. You want to see how business practices play out in the places where the company is operating, and in my context, this is often in global supply chains. It’s really important to do these field visits to understand the impacts on people and communities. That’s what we’ve done in the Amazon Forest and in Botswana. I’ve also been to Ethiopia to look at factories that produce apparel.
In the context of finance, I didn’t take a field trip. As always in finance, it’s a remote relationship of the financial institution. The sustainability-linked loan we highlighted as a way for financial institutions to integrate human rights into their lending practices was verified through a multi-stakeholder initiative, in this specific case, the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The bank, ABN AMRO, required palm oil producers to join this MSI, and as the palm oil producers could show progress toward improving labor rights conditions or working conditions on palm oil plantations, the bank gave them access to more preferential interest rates.
So, again, there was a financial incentive built in for palm oil companies to make progress toward improving working conditions, but the implementation was managed through the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil and their system. I thought this was a smart way of connecting a third-party independent body to access to preferential interest rates that ABN AMRO offered in an interest to invest in palm oil companies that have more robust businesses, including decent working conditions for workers on palm oil plantations.
Question 12: How long does it take to produce these studies and how do you assess the scalability of the models in your case studies?
Answer: The process usually takes at least 18 months because there are typically a series of interviews. Initially, you talk to some people, go into the field, and come back to the people you talked to initially. Beyond the case of the individual company we’re featuring, we want to understand if other companies would be interested in taking up the model we’ve identified.
For example, in the context of rubber sourcing from the Amazon, we wrote the case about VEJA. But we then learned in the process that there’s another company currently being coached by VEJA to understand the model and apply it at a much bigger scale. That company is Michelin, a French tire company that, of course, has massive demands for rubber. A portion of the rubber they’re planning to source in the future will come from the Amazon, applying the same model that VEJA innovated.
To me, this shows that it’s a scalable and replicable model by a much bigger company. So, the case moves to a larger company.
Question 13: How do you collaborate with others to help create these case studies, and what are your upcoming plans for this impactful work?
Answer: The case studies are a massive amount of work, but initially, I did them mostly myself. Now, I’m very happy to report that I have a slightly bigger team beyond the University of Geneva, namely colleagues from the University of New South Wales. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked with Justine Nolan, the director of the Australian Human Rights Center, and her colleague Andy Symington. Traveling together, for example, to the Amazon and last year with Justine to Botswana, makes it much easier to bounce impressions off each other and ensure we interpret the context correctly. We can split up to do interviews separately and then come together again for the write-up, checking and refining each other’s work. That’s been really helpful, and I enjoy that collaboration.
We’re moving forward and currently working on a book on transformational business models, where we will cluster the roughly 10 cases we’ve done so far. In the second part of the book, we’ll use the cases to derive drivers and enablers for human rights in business. We’ll answer questions such as: Which organizational characteristics facilitate the implementation of human rights in business? And, what does good human rights due diligence look like in practice? I’m excited about teasing out what makes business models truly transformational across these cases—sort of the lessons learned from the past six years of work.
Question 14: What is your approach to conducting research-related interviews for these case studies?
Answer: When interviewing for research, you could do it like a journalist and just drill into people’s brains to distill their knowledge. That’s not how I conduct my interviews. I want to build a relationship with the person I’m interviewing because this is the exact contact I need later to help advocate for my findings.
Typically, I don’t interview people just once but multiple times. I really want to understand where they’re coming from and where they see actual solutions. I’m not narrowly drilling them to solicit their knowledge; I want to enlist them as allies for my work. This is a way of socializing the type of research I do, and it helps later, once the research report is out, to work with these people to advance the practical recommendations.
Question 15: How do you publish your work, and who are your target audiences?
Answer: I publish my work in various formats for various audiences because we have a very broad and heterogeneous audience. We don’t publish frequently in academic journals. Instead, our main mission is to advance human rights in corporate practice.
We want to publish in places and ways that allow corporate actors to engage. This is a model, I think, invented by the NYU Stern Center, where we write public reports in a language that’s easily accessible to broader audiences. We ensure other media outlets report about our reports, shaping a public discourse with our work. That’s most important to us—the public discourse that companies need to acknowledge, because corporate practitioners do not read academic journals.
As an academic at a business school, I think it’s important to reach our key audience, namely corporate representatives. If they don’t read academic journals, that’s a problem—it means business school academia is very separated from its target audience. So, we’ve chosen other formats and outlets to reach corporate practitioners.
There’s also work that targets policymakers. After all, they set the frame for business to flourish. We offer advice on what good policy looks like. For example, in the context of tech and human rights, we’ve focused a lot on regulation because we do not think companies can self-regulate in this space.
Question 16: How does being based in Switzerland influence your work?
Answer: I’ve been based in Switzerland for over a decade. I’m now a proud citizen of Switzerland, and for my work, I think it’s a fantastic base. Switzerland has a unique ecosystem with historically grown roots in a rich human rights landscape, particularly in Geneva, but also an unparalleled density of multinational corporations and a Swiss economy that consists of over 90% small and medium-sized companies. It’s an ecosystem that brings together human rights and business in a unique way.
Our work at the Geneva Center is ideally positioned here, and we’re very happy to be part of the University of Geneva because, to me, bringing these themes into business schools and business school education is a priority. We believe the next generation of managers needs to be trained in the classroom to navigate these difficult business challenges. (Find the 2025 Toolkit on “Educating Future Leaders – Integrating Human Rights into Business Education” here.)
Switzerland has sectors that are particularly interesting from a business and human rights perspective. We mentioned finance before, and Geneva is an important hub for commodity traders. I believe commodity traders are overlooked actors in global supply chain research. They have a lot of knowledge and leverage, and we should include them in our work. They trade key commodities like gold, coffee, and cocoa. Every third cup of coffee we drink in Switzerland somehow goes through Switzerland through trading. These are all areas where I want to do more work. There’s the luxury sector in Switzerland, and traders also deal with transition minerals. I find it very easy to connect my work with priority sectors in Switzerland.
Question 17: How do you balance your roles between University of Geneva and New York University?
Answer: The two Centers have aligned missions and for most of my work I wear both hats. Initially, I started as the research director in New York, and we then relocated to Switzerland. In the first years, I was there full-time and traveled more frequently to New York. With the pandemic, a lot moved online, and I do most of my work from here, but I see my colleagues in various places every six to eight weeks.
The director of the NYU Stern Center comes through Europe frequently, so I meet him here, and I go to New York three or four times a year, sometimes a bit longer over the summer. In past years, my family and I usually spent summers in New York, which was a good time to catch up with the team. So, we’ve made it work.
Our research also doesn’t play out in Europe or the US, so for the field research, we travel to places like Ethiopia, Botswana, or the Amazon. Travel is needed anyway. Initially, in New York, we had a big research project on the apparel industry in Bangladesh, and it was actually easier to get to Bangladesh from Geneva than from New York.
Question 18: What shaped your career path in business and human rights?
Answer: I think what was really influential was my time in the US. The tone and spirit at academic institutions in the US are very different from European institutions. I really appreciate this excited, can-do attitude in the US that I’ve experienced in academic institutions there. It was inspiring for me to work with really smart people in the US, and I’m very happy that I still have this connection to an academic institution there.
Generally, early on, I was drawn to a profession that would allow me to align my values with what I do every day. There was not a straight line toward that, but everything I did, I tried to do very well. I started studying political science, and I just loved international relations. Then I realized we were only talking about governments, but the real action is often with private actors, companies, and NGOs, which came up very rarely in my political science studies. I felt that was wrong.
So, I transitioned toward economics around the end and did a PhD in economics. That transition was a logical one for me. One thing often led to the other, and everything I did, I tried to do well at a given point in time, and it often opened doors for the next thing. That would also be my career advice: really dive into what you do right now, and it will lead to the next thing.
Question 19: Do you believe your upbringing influence your career choice to work in business and human rights?
Answer: I’m not sure, but I don’t think my parents are surprised. I believe they can see how my current roles fit my personality and allow me to do what I always wanted to do. My parents are not involved in academia; they’re both civil servants, now retired.
What shaped me was my parents’ keen interest in what’s going on in the world. I grew up in a political household that encouraged discussions on topics of public interest. I learned a lot in this context.
Question 20: You grew up in Germany and left at 19. How did your international experiences shape you?
Answer: I started university in Germany and then went on an exchange program to the UK. I’ve been back briefly to finish my German degree but never fully relocated back to Germany. There were other places where I had to be, mostly in the US and Switzerland.
I did other exchanges too, with Australia, the UK, and Spain. But my formative years, I would say, were in Switzerland and the US.
Question 21: What are your views on teaching as a craft, and what is your approach to teaching business and human rights?
Answer: I love teaching. That’s, I think, key to the philosophy. You really need to love the subject you’re teaching, and I think you should love your students. If you do not like your students, it’s so much harder to connect with them.
I come into the classroom with an interest in who’s in front of me and how to connect with them. I think that makes a good teacher. You want to understand a bit about where they come from, what their current knowledge base is, and then hopefully excite them with the work that excites me.
Question 22: How do you approach public speaking to engage diverse audiences?
Answer: I can’t say I was trained in a method of public speaking, but it’s much easier to speak publicly about a subject you love. The same thing I said about teaching applies to public speaking. Speakers should make an effort to figure out who’s in the audience, how to connect with them, and how to build a bridge.
You need to be analytically rigorous to have something of substance to say. But then you also need to find ways to translate your knowledge in ways that excite an audience. That often requires finding a common language, simplifying, and finding hooks the audience can relate to. Understanding their concerns and where they’re coming from is often a way into transitioning into the work you want to put forward.
Question 23: How does persuasion factor into your work, such as in teaching or helping to improve business standards?
Answer: For a long time, I hoped that facts alone could persuade, but we now live in different times, and we see pushback against undeniable facts, like in the context of climate change, and also the huge success of politically motivated disinformation. That clearly shows that many people cannot be convinced by facts alone or actually distrust facts.
So, I think facts need to be coupled with some storytelling to contextualize and make the facts more relatable. I also believe in the need to identify unusual allies. If you find allies for your work who are close to your target audience, they can tell the story much better than you can.
In the context of my work, for example, it would be most powerful if companies would speak up for the need to integrate human rights into business school education. I think that would make schools to listen up if companies were loud and clear about the need to hire future employees who have been trained on how to navigate human rights challenges. I would love for companies to speak louder on that topic.
Question 24: What skills do you value most in your work?
Answer: I’ve always appreciated people who really see the bigger picture, which requires analytical strength, particularly in the middle of complicated and messy processes. That’s certainly a skill I appreciate, but analytical rigor alone is not enough.
It also requires a clear moral compass and some moral courage to speak up for what matters and where we need to go. I see a lot of smart people not speaking up when it matters because it’s more work and uncomfortable. Particularly now, I think this needs to change. Smart people need to find ways to influence what’s going on in our societies.
Question 25: What upcoming research are you excited about?
Answer: I’m really excited about upcoming research I’m conducting with my colleague, Dr. Berit Knaak, and the FarmStrong Foundation in the Ivory Coast on the cocoa supply chain. We’re trying to assess whether new technologies, like earth observation technologies, can help us prioritize human rights risks in global supply chains. According to the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, companies should start their work where the most salient risks lie, where the risks are greatest.
In the cocoa supply chain, we know the risk of child labor has existed for decades. To really move the dial on child labor, we should test whether we can employ new technologies to identify the highest-risk areas. We’ll be in the Ivory Coast looking for places identified with earth observation technology, particularly forest disturbances where small farmers grow cocoa for export. With earth observation technology, you can measure the distance to the next road or school.
Forest disturbances indicate that farming is going on. If cocoa is grown there, it’s exclusively for export. If the next school and road are so far away, clearly the kids who live on that farm won’t have a chance to go to school, which constitutes a high risk for child labor. Using these technologies to identify high-risk areas is something we want to encourage companies to do. We’re currently testing the hypothesis that earth observation technology can identify high-risk areas for child labor.
Currently, many projects targeting child labor cluster around the capital of the Ivory Coast, Abidjan, and they do not go into the more remote areas where we believe the risks for child labor are even greater.
Question 26: What is your advice to students interested in pursuing a career in business and human rights?
Answer: I would not advise seeking a career specifically in the business and human rights field. I know your listeners are students and young professionals, and of course, I get this question a lot: How can I get a foot in the door in this field? There just aren’t many positions, as of yet.
But I think what you learn in my classes should be the guiding force of everything you do in the future. You can become an accountant or a marketing professional and still have business and human rights as your moral compass. As you rise in corporate or organizational hierarchies and assume leadership positions, the themes from my class, which are essentially leadership themes, will become more and more important.
My boss at NYU Stern, Michael Posner, says that typically in your seventh job of your career, these themes will come back to you. Not necessarily in your first job out of college—junior positions are often very technical, and you have to demonstrate strong technical skills. But even then, infusing what you do with an understanding of potential implications for human rights is something you can do throughout. You can do it as a marketing professional, an accountant, or someone who manages procurement and global supply chains. These themes are everywhere if you look through a lens of human rights, even if your title doesn’t include human rights.
Question 27: What advice would you give to students aiming to work at the intersection of business, ethics, and human rights?
Answer: That’s a difficult question. A key piece of advice for my business school students would be to make sure you enter business contexts where you don’t have to leave your values at the door, but you can actually advance your values through what you do. That would then also automatically create the type of economy I think we need.
Also, as a business graduate, please consider public office, because we need really smart, business-trained policymakers as well.
Thank you for reading.
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Adjunct Professor, Institute of Management
Director, Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights
The University of Geneva | Switzerland
Research Director, Stern Center for Business and Human Rights
New York University | USA
*Note: This interview was recorded on June 18, 2025, and has been edited for clarity, ease of readability, and length.
**Illustrations by: The photos shown in this interview were made available by Prof. Baumann-Pauly.