A Tribute to Sir Geoffrey Chandler
By Chris Marsden.
I also feel it to be a great honour to be chosen to pay tribute to this great man, with
memories of his warm friendship, his unerring courtesy, his delight in debate, his terrierlike pursuit of a just cause and his bluntness of expression when someone or some
organisation, he thought should have done better, somehow failed to do so.
I first came across Geoffrey in 1986, when he led ‘Industry Year’ with a passion to get
across, especially to the world of education, the importance of industry as a creator of the
nation’s wealth. From that initiative many fertile and long lasting links between education
and industry have grown. Then in the mid-1990s, when he was pioneering the Amnesty
Business Group, I remember attending several conferences and business school seminars
where he spoke, again always passionately, about the purpose of business being to create
value for society as a whole. The pursuit of profit, he argued, was a means to this higher
end, not an end in itself. He spoke of business leaders needing to take a kind of
‘Hippocratic Oath’ on taking high office, to focus their business strategy on this holistic
view of their companies’ bottom lines.
In 1998 Geoffrey invited me to join the Amnesty Business Group and I had the great
experience of accompanying him on visits to the head offices of several of the UK’s top
multi-nationals, in an effort to persuade them to adopt human rights policies based on the
UN Declaration of Human Rights. Most of these companies now have such policies and are
in various stages of putting them into practice. Much of the credit for this must be given to
Geoffrey’s pioneering efforts and indefatigable powers of persuasion.
In the year 2000 Geoffrey decided that he should relinquish the Chair of the Business
Group and persuaded me to succeed him at the beginning of the following year. His was an
impossible act to follow. However, such was the reputation that the Group had gained
under his leadership, that we were able to carry its work forward and, over the next seven
years, persuade Amnesty to integrate targeting business, along with its traditional targeting
of governments, with respect to its impact on human rights. During this time hardly a day,
certainly never a week, went by without Geoffrey either e-mailing or phoning me on a
current issue and what he thought we should be doing about it. He was also always ready to
listen as well as give advice (and sometimes even to receive it!). He was a great mentor.
In a note to me when we were discussing what I might say in this tribute, Lucy described
how she never really understood (and I quote) ‘how Geoffrey achieved so much, at a time
in life when most people wind down, and he no longer had a natural platform from which
to work. He seemed to invent a new career, with one strong message for the world, and an
unshakable determination to get it across. Before a talk he always said to Lucy that he,
Geoffrey, just said the same things again and again. It was boring but that was what he
believed. Was this repetition of a simple and incontrovertible belief enough to change a
whole area of thought about the relationship of business to all the people it touched; that
people are more important than profits? Is this how things are moved on in the world? It’s
as if Geoffrey had an idea whose time had come, and nothing could hold him back.’
I think, in fact, he had an idea before its time but, through turning it into a strong message
and with an unshakable determination to get it across, as Lucy describes, Geoffrey did,
during the final 20 years of his life, make it an idea whose time at last had come. He was
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largely responsible for introducing the idea that companies had a responsibility for
respecting human rights of all those on whom their business had an impact, well beyond
just obeying the law of whatever country they were operating in. His energetic and
passionate pursuit of this cause over those 20 years has produced real change.
Most recently he took great pleasure in the work of his friend, John Ruggie, until earlier
this year the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Business and Human
Rights. The adoption by the UN Human Rights Council of the Guiding Principles,
produced by John Ruggie and his team, has effectively consolidated Geoffrey’s ideas into
clear expectation of company performance with the authority of the UN Human Rights
Council behind it.
In John Ruggie’s own words:
“When the history of this transformative movement in Global Governance is written,
Geoffrey will occupy a prominent place at its origins. For he more than any other single
individual brought the challenges of business and human rights to our attention”.
In considering this tribute, I wrote to several people who knew Geoffrey’s work well and I
would like to share with you some of their comments.
Peter Frankental, who was first appointed to work with the Business Group by Geoffrey,
thanks to the support given by Joel Joffe, and has subsequently become one of Amnesty’s
leading actors in their work with the business sector, remembers especially (and I quote)
‘Geoffrey’s indomitable personality, intellect, humour, wit and sense of purpose which
combined to make him a great speaker and debater, a brilliant ally and a formidable
opponent. He was able to reduce complex issues to basic principles that could be
understood by policy makers across sectors. He had the courage of his convictions, never
afraid to stand up to companies, governments and NGOs, even if it meant, as it
occasionally did, being a lone voice.’
Frances House, a founding member of the Business Group, a previous Board member of
Amnesty UK and now working with the Institute for Human Rights and Business, has
similar striking memories. I quote:
‘My first introduction to the world of business and human rights was on a late September
afternoon in a leafy garden in St. John’s Wood, London. It was the house of Tom
Blumenau, a founder member of Amnesty International, and Sir Geoffrey was presiding
over a small but dedicated group, which constituted the first Amnesty Business Group. He
quoted Evelyn Waugh and berated those of us who hadn’t read ‘Scoop’. I have never heard
anyone else deliver business and human rights discourse with the same literary erudition
and wit,- and I confess I miss it! From these small beginnings in Tom’s sitting room or
garden, Geoffrey’s passion, vision and determination, together with Peter Frankental’s
exceptional dedication, built that small Amnesty Business group into a large professional
collection of individuals from all sectors who recognised the importance of actively
promoting companies’ responsibilities to respect human rights.
Rory Sullivan, also a previous member of the Amnesty Business Group, endorses this
view, I quote:‘Perhaps Geoffrey’s greatest legacy is the number and quality of people who
are now active in the human rights field, many of whom trace their initial involvement to
some interaction with Geoffrey.’
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Chris Avery, who directs the work of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre,
which Geoffrey greatly admired, writes: ‘Geoffrey was a generous source of wisdom,
encouragement and support to so many of us. . . . . I’ll never forget that generous spirit –
along with his amazing energy and persistent work to make human rights a reality in the
private sector.’
John Ruggie again:
‘I had admired Geoffrey and his immense contributions to advancing the business and
human rights agenda long before I met him. Thereafter, I also benefited personally from
his wisdom, and enjoyed his wit and humor. We truly bonded when we discovered that both
of us got most hot under the collar when witnessing the triumph of doctrine over practical
reasoning, as a result of which clearly remediable injustices in the world around us are not
eliminated. That is when we became the closest of email buddies. I miss Geoffrey for all
those reasons, and more.’
Finally, John Elkington, founder of Sustainability on whose council Geoffrey was a
founding member wrote in his blog the following words, with which I would like to end:
‘How do you sum up someone who has played the role of an affectionate, wise, provocative
and sometimes disconcerting guardian angel? None of us can possibly have had the true
measure of Geoffrey that his wife Lucy and their daughters did—and it is to them we now
send our love and best wishes, together with our thanks for sharing so much of this
extraordinary man with the rest of us.’
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