In this episode of the Democracy that Delivers podcast, Frank Brown, Director for the Anti-Corruption and Governance Center (ACGC), is joined by Cristina Ritter, Head of Governance and Anti-Corruption at the UN Global Compact (UNGC), in a discussion on the UNGC resolution and how it has served as a vital tool to bring together governments and the private sector in 190 countries to combat global corruption. With over 25,000 participants worldwide, UNGC uses national commitments to its business integrity policies to empower SMEs at the national level to leverage the power of collective action to advance anti-corruption compliance initiatives. Listen in to learn more about how UNGC has collaborated with CIPE over the years and what comes next for the organization.
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Cristina Ritter is an attorney-at-law specialized in business administration with a professional career of 20 years in both the United Nations and the private sector. She is currently the Head of Governance and Anti-Corruption at the UN Global Compact. Prior to this position, Ms. Ritter worked for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) since 2014, where she provided technical assistance in various continents on the international standards and tools to address corruption and money laundering, while engaging in international cooperation and asset recovery. Over the years, she was designated Global Coordinator of the Integrity Component of CRIMJUST, a UNODC flagship programme against drug-trafficking, she became responsible for the Americas at the Corruption and Economic Crime Branch (CEB) and served as Regional Anti-Corruption Advisor twice. In this context, she engaged with chambers of commerce, compliance associations, private sector entities and companies in over twenty countries to promote business integrity. She also fostered private-public dialogue, achieving the adoption of multiple policies, legal frameworks and national anti-corruption strategies.
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Transcript
Announcer (00:02):
The Democracy That Delivers podcast is brought to you today by the Anti-Corruption and Governance Center at CIPE. This is the podcast where we talk about corruption in its many forms. And now to your host, Frank Brown.
Frank Brown (00:17):
Hello everybody, and welcome to the Democracy That Delivers podcast from the Center for International Private Enterprise, or CIPE. My name is Frank Brown and I head up the Anti-Corruption and Governance unit here at CIPE and the Center, the Anti-Corruption and Governance Center, or ACGC, is very happy to bring you this edition of the Democracy That Delivers podcast and feature a very special guest joining us from New York City, Cristina Ritter, who’s the Head of Governance and Anti-Corruption at the UN Global Compact. Welcome, Cristina.
Cristina Ritter (00:49):
Thank you, Frank. Thank you for inviting me to this podcast.
Frank Brown (00:53):
It’s great to have you here. For listeners, I wanted to give a little background of Cristina’s resume and what she’s done before joining the UN Global Compact.
(01:03):
So Cristina is an attorney at law and she specializes in business administration. Prior to joining the UN Global Compact, she worked for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, where she provided technical assistance in various continents on the international standards and tools to address corruption and money laundering. At UNODC, Cristina was designated global coordinator of the Integrity component of CRIMJUST, which is a UNODC flagship program against drug trafficking. In this context, she engaged with chambers of commerce, compliance association, private sector entities, and companies in over 20 countries to promote business integrity.
(01:45):
So Cristina, I wanted to jump in right away and just have you tell us a little bit more about your background, the business connection here, we’re sensing business integrity dimension, and that obviously relates very directly to CIPE’s work. But could you talk a little bit about how you landed at the UN Global Compact and how long you’ve been there?
Cristina Ritter (02:04):
Yes. So as you mentioned, I currently work as the Head of Governance and Anti-Corruption at the UN Global Compact, since December 2022. So I have been here for almost two years, and prior to this job I spent almost nine years at the Corruption and Economic Crime branch of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC. UNODC is the guardian of the UN Convention against corruption. I started there at the regional office for Central America and the Caribbean in Panama, and eventually moved to headquarters in Vienna. And at UNODC I had the pleasure to work on all aspects of anti-corruption and with different actors, from children to justice operators, and anti-corruption authorities, civil society, and of course, with the private sector. So that was an experience.
(03:00):
And before my time in UNODC, as you pointed out, I worked for the private sector. So I started my career as an attorney, spent four years in a law firm, then I left to study my MBA and worked for four more years as head of business management and legal affairs in a company. So that’s my professional background that took me here. Geographically where I come from, I’m Panamanian. I was raised in Canada in Montreal, specifically. So that’s a little bit about me.
Frank Brown (03:32):
Super. It’s always really helpful to be able to place our guests in some sort of context, and it’s really useful to understand that you came from the private sector originally and transitioned into the UN universe.
(03:44):
I think it would be helpful for listeners if we could get a little bit of a description about the UN Global Compact, what its mission is and where you fit in with your Head of Governance and Anti-Corruption into the UN Global Compact unit, if you don’t mind.
Cristina Ritter (03:59):
Sure. So the United Nations Global Compact, in short, it’s basically the office of the UN that works with the private sector. So it is the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world with over 25,000 participants and presence in 162 countries. So it’s basically for companies that wish to commit to higher standards in four areas. Labor, human rights environment, and anti-corruption, as well as other cross-cutting issues such as good governance and gender. So that’s how I fit into the programmatic unit of the Global Compact. I’m the head of one of those four main areas that we work on.
Frank Brown (04:53):
Thank you. And one of my questions I always ask for anybody who engages on the part of a multilateral or an NGO with the business community is, how do you incentivize their involvement with you UN Global Compact? In other words, what’s in it for them, what’s in it for businesses?
Cristina Ritter (05:11):
Okay, so we work with our participant companies through our value proposition that translates basically into four engagement opportunities that we call connect, lead, learn, and communicate.
(05:25):
So we connect with them mainly through our country networks across the world. These are basically created when Global Compact participant companies in one country, they come together, they organize, and then they create this country network. So from headquarters, we work both with companies directly on some topics, but a lot of our work goes through our country networks when we want to roll out a training, for example, or convene companies from different countries for a consultation. So we use our country networks for that. And also our regional hubs across the world, these really help us have a sense of the context on the ground. And another way of connecting is through our relevant conferences where we can discuss challenges, trends, solutions. So for example, our flagship event is the Leader Summit and it takes place every September in New York.
(06:28):
Then the second engagement opportunity is to lead. So connecting at the national, regional, and global levels, like I said before, that gives us a sense of the priorities we should be focusing on. So we work on amplifying the voice of the private sector so that those priorities are heard in spaces where policies, strategies, or legal frameworks are being adopted. In this way, we help companies have an impact in the ecosystem where they operate. We also make sure that their perspectives are represented in the global anti-corruption arena, and at the regional level and the regional platforms to fast-track the UN Convention against Corruption, but also at the national level through collective action.
(07:20):
Another way that we can have our companies leading is through a delivery channel that we call the Think Labs, through thought leadership. And it’s when we convene a group of champion companies interested in advancing a given topic and innovative together. Then in practice, the Think Lab holds several sessions to develop practical guidelines that we then disseminate around the world, which takes me to our third engagement opportunity, which is learn. So when those guidelines or those standards are produced, we will turn them into capacity building deep dives or e-learning modules or train the trainer accelerator programs that we, like I said, promotes through our country networks.
(08:12):
And finally, our fourth engagement opportunity is to communicate. And this is very important because our participant companies, they have the obligation to publicly report on progress made around the four topics that I mentioned before, anti-corruption, labor, human rights and environment. So this mechanism enables us to gather data by region, country, sector, size of the company, and therefore make evidence-based decisions that will guide our priorities and programming.
Frank Brown (08:46):
This is really useful, because I’ve only interacted with UNGC either at the very top or at the very bottom. So often when CIPE’s anti-corruption unit is looking at beginning to work in a given country, we’ll look at what UNGC companies there are in that country because right away we know that they have an interest and a level of commitment to the same issues and concerns that we have.
(11:46):
One other question I had was, so in our experience when we’re engaging with the private sector with the business community in a given country, the needs related to anti-corruption compliance, especially of an SME, of a small business versus the needs of a multinational are very different. And so I’m wondering how you reconcile those different sets of needs by your 25,000 participants. Is it a big enough tent to accommodate everybody, or do you have separate programs, or how do you do that?
Cristina Ritter (12:17):
Yes. So actually, 65% I believe of our constituency are SMEs. So yes, every programmatic area needs to be mindful of that. When we produce those guidelines that I mentioned before, the trainings, the capacity building opportunities, and recently, we’ve launched a program specifically for SMEs called Spark, so we’re moving forward with that. And we have programs called the Accelerators, soon next year, hopefully we will be able to launch an Accelerator on business integrity that will definitely take into account the size of the companies and really help them identify the risks that are proper to the size of their companies and the mitigation measures that they can take consequently.
Frank Brown (13:19):
One of the first times that we actually engaged with the UN Global Compact in a meaningful way was that the COSP, which was held in Atlanta in late 2023, and you played a critical role in the first-ever private sector forum that was part of that COSP. And so I wanted to ask you if you could describe for listeners a little bit what a COSP is and what the UN Convention Against Corruption is and how the private sector has had a growing role in that long-time global movement.
Cristina Ritter (13:56):
Sure. So yes, last year was a big year for our portfolio. So the Conference of the State Parties to the UN Convention Against Corruption, or COSP, its acronym, is the main most important global conference on anti-corruption in the world. It’s basically a meeting of all the countries that have ratified this convention, so almost every country in the world. They come together every two years in a different location to discuss the challenges, the priorities of implementing anti-corruption measures, and ultimately, commit to specific solutions, priorities, through resolutions.
(14:51):
So most people are familiar with the Climate COP, which happens every year. This one is the anti-corruption COP, and it happens every two years. So last year it took place in Atlanta, it always happens in December around the International Anti-Corruption Day, which we celebrate every 9th December. It was very special last year because they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the UN Convention Against Corruption. So for us, it was really like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, in that we saw to bring the voice of the private sector to that conference. So we started preparing for that in September at our Leader Summit, where we asked companies to develop a call to action from business to governments. And so we basically worked on that, drafting a high-level one-pager document with five priority areas where we want governments to focus their anti-corruption and governance efforts.
(16:01):
So the five topics that came up were related to incentives, more corporate sustainability criteria in government decision-making processes, collective action, the use of technology and AI, and some values, ethical leadership values and education. So that call to action, we opened that for signatures through October, November. CITE help helped us disseminate the call to action and our partners, they also helped us with that. In the end, in only two months, we had signatures from 91 countries around the world and we presented the call to action at the Anti-Corruption COP in December, in Atlanta.
(16:49):
Also, besides the call to action, we did host with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the first-ever private sector forum inside of COSP. And we did so with CIPE and with other partners, almost 20 partners. And the idea started because the host country, which was the US, they told us at a very, very early stage last year that they wanted presence of companies. In addition to that, UNODC received so many requests for site events related to business integrity and anti-corruption in the private sector from different international organizations.
(17:32):
So we decided to put them all under one umbrella, under one roof, which is a private sector forum, and so this event in the end lasted two days. We all worked together on the agenda, it was a major undertaking, but it was very successful. Why? Because we received a wonderful response from governments. Governments there recognized both the call to action and the private sector forum and adopted a resolution that committed 190 countries to adopt incentives for business integrity. It was Brazil who proposed the resolution, also sponsored by Norway and Saudi Arabia, but finally it was adopted so we were really happy to really receive that recognition and that instant response from governments. Now the challenge is really to translate that commitment at the global level to the national level.
Frank Brown (18:40):
That’s fascinating and I think I had never been to a COSP before, before I went last December in Atlanta. And at first I was a little skeptical, like what could this big unwieldy process offer for businesses which are typically quite nimble, looking at short-term frameworks and results?
(19:01):
But what became clear after a couple of days on the ground was that all these countries that had signed up to the UN Convention Against Corruption, some of them are pretty rough places. They’re authoritarian states with terrible corruption problems, but here they are making these commitments regarding the private sector. And so that’s important to an organization like CIPE, because when we start to work in these countries, we can cite those commitments as if nothing else, a conversation starter. Even if we don’t have much optimism that something will change, those commitments are a place that we can start. And that over the years as I’ve worked at CIPE, I begin to see the tremendous value of the UN Global Compact through that lens that because it’s so wide-reaching and is so inclusive, the 25,000 participants, as you said, that we can go pretty much anywhere in the world and if nothing else, there’ll be some commitments around that and we’ll have some local allies in the private sector.
Cristina Ritter (20:00):
Exactly. People, sometimes they ask me, “Okay, so this resolution is a kind of high level up there commitment. What do you do with that? How do you translate that into reality?” And the truth is that that resolution helps us, like you said, to at least have the first conversation with the government because after they adopt these resolutions, they have a commitment to report on what they’re doing to implement the resolution. So there are meetings taking place in Vienna every year and then the COSP every two years, where all countries that are state parties of the convention, they must report on what they’re doing. So this is a first step that really enables us to knock on the government door at the national level and tell them, “Look, you committed to this. Let’s do it together. We are here to help and to support you.”
(21:02):
And in fact, three months later, after the resolution was adopted in December, we launched a resource guide with UNODC and with the OECD to support governments to adopt incentives for business integrity and sanctions for wrongdoing. And we included an entire chapter on involving the private sector in this endeavor. So today, again, we are working now on trying to translate this resolution at the regional and national level. And something we did this year about that was very fantastic in Africa, was that UNODC has these regional platforms around the world meant to fast-track the implementation of the UN Convention Against Corruption. Each of these platforms, they comprises a group of countries that convene to select four to five thematic areas where they want to focus their anti-corruption efforts.
(22:11):
So most of these regional platforms actually, they have picked the engagement with the private sector as a priority area. UNODC and the UN Global Compact joined forces to bring companies for the first time to a regional conference of the platform for East Africa and Kenya. 25% of the participants came from the private sector, and the rest were mainly anti-corruption authorities, government officials, and civil society. So during four days, we co-drafted a roadmap with very concrete, specific actions to advance each thematic area, including the engagement of the private sector. And by the end of the week, the roadmap was endorsed. CIPE was there, Transparency International, and other partners also contributed to this and I think it was a major achievement.
(23:13):
So again, we have the commitment, the resolution at the global level. We reinforce it at the regional level through those platforms, and then we take it to the national level through collective action. And on this, the UN Global Compact, thanks to the Siemens Integrity Initiative, and now US funding too, has over 15 years of experience around the world that we have translated into a specific methodology to go about collective action against corruption. We have this in a playbook, you can find it on our website, and that’s the methodology that we use.
Frank Brown (23:57):
So collective action is a place where we often meet, and that has to do really with our efforts in Indonesia and Thailand, Armenia, just to name a few places, to on a very grassroots level, gather together typically SMEs around a corruption issue that companies aren’t comfortable addressing individually but they will do so collectively together.
(24:18):
Another place that we’re intersecting with the UN Global Compact on corruption issues is around this relatively new state department funded project called Galvanizing the Private Sector as Partners in Combating Corruption. And we’re an implementer of this, OECD is an implementer, CoST, the Infrastructure Anti-Corruption Group is an implementer, UNODC is an implementer, and then you are an implementer as well. And I’m wondering, Cristina, if you could talk a little bit about that work, what your piece of Galvanizing the Private Sector, or GPS program looks like?
Cristina Ritter (24:51):
Yes, exactly. So we’re all corruption fighters and something beautiful about the organizations that work against corruption is, I feel we are part of a tight community, right? And we see each other pretty often actually throughout the year in our different conferences, activities, and working together in the field. So yes, we are all part of the Galvanizing the Private Sector as Partners in Combating Corruption Initiative. Now, different organizations receiving these funds obviously have different projects and their own goals and targets, but we definitely aim at coordinating, finding synergies and avoiding the duplication of efforts.
(25:35):
So for us, our project is called Uniting Leaders for Business Integrity. We are starting the second phase actually, we are co-implementing with UNODC. And the first phase was basically around what I already mentioned. At the global level there was a big deliverable was the actual private sector forum that we achieved. The call to action was part of it. After COSP and after the resolution was adopted, we felt the need to be on the same page, governments and companies, on exactly what is business integrity, what deserves incentives? So this is important obviously, to be on the same page and to establish.
(26:27):
And so 10 years ago there was a standard on programs of compliance and ethics for business that was developed by the OECD, the World Bank, and UNODC, as mandated by the G-20. After 10 years, this publication definitely needs some update and that is something that we are doing this year with transformational governance lens. So that is also part of the project. We are bringing, I guess, those programs of compliance to an alignment with corporate sustainability frameworks through that Think Lab.
(27:16):
And then we are also working, like I said, on collective action, our two first target countries were Kenya and Uruguay. To give you a few concrete examples of what we’re doing in those countries. In Kenya, our country network has definitely become leader, I would say, in bringing the voice of the private sector into the development of policies, strategies, and legal networks, legal frameworks, I’m sorry. They were involved, for example, in the drafting of the anti-bribery law in its models, procedures, and also regulations. And recently, they have taken part also in the consultations for the new National Integrity Plan of Kenya. They have also a code of ethics that they’re supporting, aligned with these regulations for companies to sign up to.
(28:14):
And in Uruguay, we’re doing something similar. We’re bringing, again, the voice of the private sector to the development of the first anti-corruption piece of legislation. So we are working there with the anti-corruption authority to make this possible. So in both cases, we’re targeting the legislation, I guess, because we know that has an impact in the entire national level, and especially when it requires from companies the adoption of compliance programs or integrity measures that makes a difference in the country. So that’s what we are doing under those projects.
(28:54):
And the second phase that we are now starting will definitely include the institutionalization hopefully, of a private sector forum from now on in every COSP. Next COSP will take place in Qatar and December next year. So I really hope if everything goes right, that we will have even a bigger and better private sector forum there with CIPE and all of our partners.
Frank Brown (29:22):
No, we’re very much looking forward to it, especially now that I think we fully grasped the potential of the COSP mechanism and the role that we can play.
(29:30):
I wanted to ask you one last question, Cristina, that touches upon I think a moment of celebration that you had last month, September in New York City. I think it was just before or after on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, and that is the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Principle 10. And colleagues of mine were there and colleagues from all sorts of anti-corruption NGOs and governments as well, all were in attendance at this celebration in Manhattan. Could you describe a little bit what that was and what the significance of it is to the global anti-corruption community?
Cristina Ritter (30:07):
Yes. So first of all, what is Principle 10? I explained earlier that companies that join the Global Compact, they commit to higher standards on labor, human rights, environment, and anti-corruption. Well, these four areas are translated into 10 specific principles. Principle 10 is the one that focuses on anti-corruption and literally states that business should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery. So it’s pretty simple. And so based on that principle, we call on companies to tackle corruption internally through good governance, compliance, and business integrity, but also externally, so across their supply chain. And finally, collectively by engaging in collective action.
(31:00):
So this year, indeed, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Principle 10, and on this occasion, we held a high level event during the UN General Assembly Week in New York. Convening leaders from the public and private sectors, as well as representatives of international organizations. I mean, all of our partners, civil society were there.
(31:24):
So the conference was divided into three segments because it was an anniversary. So past, present, and future. We started off with a really special session, a dialogue between Mr. Peter Eigen, who is the Founder of Transparency International and the father of Principal 10, and Ms. Ivanna Alvarado, a youth ethics ambassador of UNODC from Bayer, Mexico. We wanted to gather the perspectives of different generations on how the engagement of the private sector in the fight against corruption has evolved in the past 20 years. So while Mr. Eigen focused on highlighting integrity parts as the best practice to fight corruption externally, Ivanna emphasized the importance of a culture of integrity, the corporate purpose, and even mental health in the workplace for the recruitment and retention of talent. So I thought that was very, very interesting from the new generation.
(32:30):
And then we started our three segments, past, present, and future. So to start off the past segment, we heard about one of the biggest scandals of the past decades, the Panama Papers, and then we had a panel that mentioned the former UN Global Compact Anti-Corruption Working Group as one initiative of the past that was very successful. So this group, this anti-corruption group, was once co-shared by TI on certain occasions, UNODC on others, and it was active until 2016. It was really a pioneer in issuing some flagship anti-corruption guidelines that remain very valid today.
(33:22):
For example, the corruption risk assessment methodology came from this group, and the idea came up for this group to be reestablished and meet at every COSP or Conference of State Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption. So this was one of the findings of the past segment that I found very interesting and that we are currently scoping to see if we indeed reestablish this group and adopt these meetings at COP every two years so that they can really establish a global business integrity agenda with all of our partners.
(34:02):
Then during the present segment, we discussed the current priorities in this field, and what are the current priorities? I already mentioned them. We took them from the call to action and also from the work of the B20 Task Force on Integrity and Compliance. So this task force that was re-established this year by Brazil because it was canceled last year, has been working on recommendations for the G-20 on a policy paper. For the G-20 actually, this policy paper was completed and next week the B20 Summit will take place in Brazil. And it’s interesting because the priorities of the B20 are the same basically, priorities of the call to action. So we are very much aligned again, incentives, collective action, the use of AI. Although one priority that they have that we didn’t have in our call to action was precisely mental health in the workplace. So it seems like this is a very innovative topic that we can easily connect to a culture of integrity, especially according to Ivanna Alvarado who mentioned that, the Principle 10 event.
(35:24):
And finally, we discussed the future segment. So, what is coming up for the Principle 10 in the upcoming years? And the way we see it is that in past two decades, the anti-corruption movement in the private sector evolved from mere compliance to a more holistic concept of integrity and beyond, because it’s basically from doing what’s legal to doing what’s right. So this February, this year we launched the Transformational Governance Corporate Toolkit available on our website, and we promote this transformational governance approach that takes into account this evolution that I just mentioned, by merging traditional good governance or compliance as we know it with its typical 12 elements, with sustainable governance, which addresses the impact that companies have on societies and on the environment. But then we take it one step further by calling on companies to also contribute to the ecosystem where they operate in line with SDG 16 on peace, justice, the rule of law and strong institutions.
(36:44):
So that is what I was mentioning before, the Think Lab that is updating the standard on compliance and integrity with transformational governance lens seeks to address the new complexities and challenges that companies are increasingly facing. And coming to the forefront are matters related to corporate sustainability, regulations and reporting, the evolution of technology and artificial intelligence, of course, emerging risks resulting from geopolitical issues and conversion crisis, to name a few.
(37:20):
So in conclusion, based on the discussions of the Principle 10 events, priorities for us in the upcoming years will be to establish or institutionalize the private sector forum at COSP and hopefully reestablish this anti-corruption working group. And also, securing its presence at COSP to promote the adoption of incentives for business integrity at the national level to support companies in their transformational governance journey to explore the topic of AI and gen AI and how it can contribute to business integrity. And perhaps, how a culture of integrity influences mental health in the workplace. Since we’ve been hearing so much about that and we know that it helps recruitment and retention of talent in this new generation, which according to our recent CEO study, is one of the main challenges that CEOs are facing today. So, those are our priorities.
Frank Brown (38:24):
This is a great way, I think to wrap up the podcast. You brought us through the vision for the future, what the next steps will be, transformational governance, a role that the private sector will play. And I think it’s safe to say that we hope to make parts of this journey with you, we being CIPE and the anti-corruption unit within CIPE.
(38:42):
Cristina, I wanted to thank you very much for taking some time out on a winter-y afternoon in New York City where you’re based. For the listeners, just as a reminder, this was the Democracy That Delivers Podcast, brought to you by the Anti-Corruption and Governance Center. And our guest today was Cristina Ritter, and she’s the Head of Governance and Anti-Corruption at the UN Global Compact. My name is Frank Brown and I head up the Anti-Corruption and Governance Center here at CIPE. Thank you so much for joining us.
Cristina Ritter (39:10):
Thank you, Frank. It was a true pleasure, and I know we will be working together on this issue in the future. So, thank you for inviting me.
Announcer (39:19):
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Published Date: October 30, 2024