Speakers - Engaging Business

Jonathan Drimmer - Partner, Paul Hastings

Jonathan C. Drimmer

Partner, Paul Hastings

Jonathan C. Drimmer is a partner in the Investigations and White-Collar Defense practice of Paul Hastings, based in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading attorneys on business and human rights, and is a frequent speaker, author and commentator on human rights, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPs), the UK Modern Slavery Act, and Environmental, Social and Governance (“ESG”) issues more generally.

Mr. Drimmer is known for undertaking a practical, efficient, and often creative approach that uniquely considers hard and soft law standards, as well as stakeholder expectations, to appropriately calibrate and address relevant legal and operational risks. He is the former Deputy General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of Barrick Gold, one of the world’s largest mining companies. At Barrick, he developed among the first global human rights programs after the groundbreaking adoption of the UNGPs. He thus is perhaps the only private practitioner to have designed, implemented, and overseen a global human rights program regulatory for a major multi-national company. The program he built at Barrick has served as an industry standard, and elements of it have largely been duplicated by numerous other companies in and outside of the extractive sector. As one publication noted, Mr. Drimmer has “amass[ed] global accolades for compliance innovations” (Law 360, May 25, 2019), and aspects of Barrick’s human rights program are the subject of a 2016 Harvard Business School Case Study.

Mr. Drimmer regularly represents and advises companies, governments, multi-stakeholder initiatives, NGOs, and others on business and human rights and ESG-related legal issues. His practice spans all aspects of business and human rights, and includes companies in the technology, life sciences, extractive, agricultural, food and beverage, footwear and apparel, insurance, and financial services sectors. Over his career, he has conducted or overseen hundreds of human rights-related investigations across a range of issues and geographies. He has represented and counseled companies involved in disputes in numerous judicial and non-judicial forums, such as transnational tort cases, OECD National Contact Point Specific Instances, UN inquiries, and human rights commission claims. He has advised companies and governments on cutting edge legislative and regulatory initiatives, and Parliamentary and Congressional inquiries. He has performed scores of human rights assessments and due diligence exercises associated with transactions, business changes, or operational performance. He has assisted in establishing governance frameworks, management systems, and compliance programs for a wide range of entities, including companies, NGOs, and multi-stakeholder initiatives. He regularly reviews non-financial disclosures on human rights and ESG to assess potential litigation and reputational risks.

Based on his body of work, Mr. Drimmer has been recognized as one of the world’s leading attorneys in ethics and compliance by Ethisphere Magazine, was selected by the National Law Journal as Regulatory & Compliance Trailblazer, was recognized by Legal Era as one of the top 100 in-house counsel in the world and was selected by Law500 as one of the 100 most influential in-house counsel in the U.S. and in Canada. He currently serves on the boards of directors of the Global Compact Network Canada and the UN Global Compact Business for Peace initiative and served on the Board of Directors of the VPs from 2012-2014 and 2015-2017. He is a Strategic Advisor for the Secretariat of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, a Senior Advisor to the consultancy Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), and the North American Advisor to the Global Business Initiative (GBI). He is on the faculty of Competent Boards, which trains board members on Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) issues, and repeatedly has spoken at and/or chaired every major human rights conference in North America.

He previously served in the Justice Department as Deputy Director of the Criminal Division’s Office of Special Investigations, where he led cross-border investigations involving international humanitarian law violations, first-chaired numerous prosecutions, and argued federal appeals, and received the first U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Award for Human Rights Law Enforcement. He is a former Bristow Fellow in the Office of the U.S. Solicitor General, and a judicial clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has taught international law courses at Georgetown University Law Center for nearly 20 years.

EDUCATION

UCLA School of Law
Stanford University

Matthias Thorns - Deputy Secretary-General, International Organisation of Employers

Matthias Thorns

Deputy Secretary-General, International Organisation of Employers

As Deputy Secretary-General, Matthias Thorns has a part in the overall responsibility for the management of the IOE Secretariat in its work to support the global business community in its representation vis-a-vis the UN institutions, as well as G20, G7 and other international initiatives.

His career began as Adviser for Social Affairs in the European Business Federation UNICE (now BUSINESSEUROPE), before moving to the Confederation of German Employers (BDA) as Adviser and later Deputy Director of the International and European Affairs Department, looking after European and International Social Policy, CSR and Human Rights as well as OECD ELSA matters.

After leaving the Confederation of German Employers in 2012, Matthias joined the IOE as Senior Adviser, leading the work on Human Rights, G20 and G7, Global Supply Chains as well as SMEs.

In 2017 Matthias joined the Workplace Rights team of The Coca-Cola Company as Human Rights and Workplace Rights Manager, where he was among other things responsible for the planning, coordinating and drafting of the first stand-alone Human Rights Report of The Coca-Cola Company, the Human Rights training for bottling partners as well as the roll-out of the revised human rights policy of the Coca-Cola Company across the regions. He was also engaged in the preparation and follow-up to meetings with IUF.

In 2018 he was appointed IOE Director of Stakeholder Engagement and a year later IOE Deputy Secretary-General. Matthias supervises the IOE’s work related to G20 and G7, human rights, agenda 2030, migration and programmes under an EU framework agreement, and is responsible for the IOE company networks: the Global Industrial Relations Network (GIRN), the Global Occupational Safety and Health Network (GOSH) as well as the Corporate Partner Initiative.

Matthias is member of the transition team of the newly elected ILO DG Gilbert F. Houngbo, member of the Sustainability Board of the Mercedes Benz Group, Co-Chair of the ILO Child Labour Platform and a member of the Governance Committee of the Centre for Sports and Human Rights, the UN Global Compact Expert Network, the Global Coordination Group of the Alliance 8.7 and the Steering Group of the ILO Business Forced Labour Network.

Matthias holds a Master of Arts in European Studies and a Magister Artium in History and Philosophy, both from the University of Hannover.

He participated in the CGF “Future Leaders Programme” in 2018 and in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the U.S. State Department in July 2012.