Speaking at the Paris Peace Forum, as part of a discussion panel including President of France Emmanuel Macron and President of Estonia Alar Karis, Amazon’s Russell Grandinetti made the following remarks:
Merci, Monsieur le Président Macron, Vice President Harris, and the global leaders here. It is a privilege to be here on behalf of the Amazon team.
We are a company of passionate builders that really adhere to four key principles: an obsession over customers, passion for invention, operational excellence, and thinking about the long-term.
But we also recognize that success and scale bring broad responsibility, and this forum is the perfect place to reflect on this responsibility.
This responsibility, of course, includes ensuring the people, workers, and communities we are connected to are treated with fundamental dignity and respect.
Iain Drennan (Executive Director, WEPROTECT Global Alliance); Alar Karis (President of the Republic of Estonia); Kamala Harris (Vice President of United States of America); Emmanuel Macron (President of the Republic of France); Justine Atlan (Director General, Association e-Enfance);Susan Wojcicki (CEO, Youtube); Russell Grandinetti (Senior Vice President, Amazon)
The responsibility for ensuring the products and services we provide are developed and produced in a way that respects human rights.
The responsibility for ensuring that we build a sustainable business for our employees, our customers, our selling partners, and our shared planet. As a company, we have committed to moving to 100% renewable power in our entire company, which we are on track to do in 2025. We are a leader in founding The Climate Pledge among companies to reach the Paris Accords ten years early in 2040 and become zero-carbon. Further, just this past week at COP26, we joined a billion-dollar public-private commitment to fight tropical deforestation; and we even do things like organize our Store to make it easier for customers to find products that are sustainable, because they care about contributing too.
That responsibility for safety and wellbeing, of course, includes the physical world, but extends to the digital world. We are extremely proud to have been an original signatory, like so many others here, to the Christchurch Call, and we commend New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern and President Macron for their work bringing together not just governments, but companies and civil organizations to fight terrorism and violent extremist content online.
We invest over $700 million annually and dedicate over 10,000 employees to fighting fraud, counterfeit, and other bad behavior online.
In fact, back in the US we’ve partnered with organizations like Thorn, a tech nonprofit focused on ending child sexual abuse material on the internet, and we are a proud to be member of the WePROTECT Global Alliance.
And so, we bring this responsibility to the products and services we create, we also try and bring it to the world around us. That is why today, in this context, I am particularly pleased to be joining President Macron, other companies, and the civil society groups represented to sign on to this Memorandum on “Standing up for Children’s Rights in the Digital Environment”, which reflects our shared goal of keeping children safe online.
Thank you very much for having me.
Watch the full ceremony of the Paris Peace Forum 2021 and the speech of Russell Grandinetti below.