United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on business & human rights
Companies that have global operations, large physical footprints, a diverse range of businesses, or complex supply chains could affect the entire spectrum of internationally recognized human rights.
While the corporate responsibility to respect requires respecting all rights, it is unlikely that all issues can be addressed simultaneously. Consequently, guidance may be needed on how to prioritize potential and actual impacts on human rights.
Question for discussion:
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The Human Rights and Business Project of the Danish Institute for Human Rights has created a publication that seeks to address the issue of human rights priorization for companies.
The Arc of Human Rights Priorities is aimed at taking company focus beyond the issues that garner public attention to those that are most likely to impact human rights. The Arc model uses Severity of Violation and Company Connection to map the human rights issues each company should devote its resources to addressing in policy, procedures, monitoring and reporting.
The Arc of Human Rights Priorities is available for free online here.
For more information, see humanrightsbusiness.org.
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It seems to me that there are two questions:
1) Which human rights might a company impact in a given situation? To get to the answer the company will need to understand the context of the country (baseline studies); define the nature and geographical extent of its activities; evaluate how these could affect human rights (impact assessment); map its external relationships and evaluate if/how these could affect human rights (also impact assessment); and produce an action plan.
2) Which of the human rights challenges identified are 'most important'? Right to life comes to mind as absolutely fundamental... but the company might need to prioritise other rights, which could be pretty tricky. Is livelihood more important than free speech? If the company decides by itself which rights to prioritise it could be accused of ignorance, bias, focusing on easy challenges etc, so a credible process such as that ofered by the Danish Institute could be very valuable.