Sune Skadegård Thorsen, Senior Advisor, Ethics & Social Affairs, Novo Group (headquartered in Denmark):

"Our strategy is to take responsibility and contribute to sustainable development.

We are going on the offensive and taking a number of innovative steps aimed at bringing the Novo Group further towards contributing to sustainable development, wherever in the world we have set up business.

The core of the issue for us is to respect and live up to human rights in its broadest sense. By my evaluation, the Novo Group is among the front runners today in terms of basing our policies on human rights and not merely basic employee rights.

Globalisation makes it more and more urgent for companies generally to involve the environment and social responsibility in the decisions they reach. And here, the companies in the Novo Group have already come far compared to many other companies - but we want to go even further. We want to be in the position that the Novo Group will be able to explain why we do what we do in terms of financial, environmental and social responsibility. The management should be able to take decisions with full awareness of how these decisions will affect these bottom lines.

Very few people are aware of what the expression human rights actually means.  For most, it means taking a stand against torture and other atrocities in faraway countries. But human rights is also about the right to health, to privacy and so on. And when I am given the opportunity to explain to the staff that it also has a direct bearing on their everyday working lives, they prick up their ears.

Our strategies should express our social responsibility, internally and externally - in everything we do. And we should act on those strategies with commitment and resolution, so that it makes sense not only locally but in a much broader perspective.

Each decision should become part of a collective signal to the world about us that the Novo Group is prepared to stand up and take its share of social responsibility. This will also be of enormous significance to the staff as they will be able to identify with a company they are proud to be a part of.

We operate in countries where the political climate can change, where human rights one day, perhaps, will take a turn for the worst. But when some cynic turns round and asks 'What will you do if things get bad in China again?', then there is only one answer - that we as a group will always respect international decisions on any embargo. And until then, we believe that international trade is an excellent way to exert influence in this world.

Take a problem like child labour, for example. We try and formulate uniform demands to the first link in our chain of suppliers. We let them know what we expect of their relationships with their suppliers, based on the charter of human rights. If there is a problem further down that chain, we must be able to act proactively. This means that we should also be able to intervene with solutions, and perhaps even hard cash, to ensure a family's existence in the event we call for the abolition of child labour."

[from Companies and social responsibility, Novo Group website, accessed in 2001]