United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on business & human rights
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Updated 5 April 2010
The appropriate corporate response to managing the risks of infringing on the rights of others is to exercise human rights due diligence. One and the same process helps companies address their responsibilities to individuals and communities they impact, and their responsibilities to shareholders—thereby protecting both value and values.
Drawing on well-established practices and combining them with what is unique to human rights, the UN "Protect, Respect, Remedy" framework lays out the basic parameters of human rights due diligence, comprising four components, as follows. (For information and discussion about each of the elements, please click on its title. )
Each of these components is essential. Without them, a company cannot know and show that it is meeting its responsibility to respect rights.
Company-level grievance mechanisms perform two functions: under the tracking and reporting component of due diligence they provide the company with feedback that helps identify risks and avoid escalation of disputes; they can also provide remedy, linking to the third pillar of the “Protect, Respect, Remedy” framework. (For more information on such mechanisms, visit BASESwiki, the SRSG's information and learning resource on company-level and other non-judicial mechanisms.)
For information and discussion on each of the elements of human rights due diligence, please click on its title above. If you have comments on human rights due diligence as a whole, please share them here.
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This four-part due-dil system seems sensible to me - it fits with what many companies have for other issues, such as environmental and social impact identification and management. This fit is very important - human rights must not be isolated from other company process (this would encourage the erroneous notion that 'some other team (although I don't know which one!) "does" human rights, so I don't need to think about it in my construction team'), but become integrated within them. There is real proof that such integration works: health and safety are prime examples. The companies that have made strides in these areas in the last 30 years are those which have firmly integrated health and safety processes into doing business.
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Human Right Rating [HRR] can be done by a independent agency like credit rating agency. The Stock Exchange may ask companies to submit the "Human Right Reports" annually to them. Awareness may be build up within the investor to choose company with higher HRR for investment.
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The four elements of HRs dd are indeed sensible and provide a practical framework for a company to ensure it’s meeting the CRtR. There should be (indeed, I think there possibly is) recognition in the SRSG’s work that any system developed and applied by a company must be both ‘fit-for-purpose’ and ‘flexible’ enough to suit the vast range of business activities and socio-political environments in which companies operate.
By ‘fit-for-purpose,’ I mean to say that it should not be necessary to conduct a full HRIA for an operation where there is a low likelihood of HRs abuses, or where existing policies and procedures adequately address and mitigate the risk of any HRs abuse (for example, through SIA, contractor management and HR policies). Equally, it may not be adequate to rely on existing policies to meet the CRtR in highly complex environments, with multiple contracts and sub-contracts, large workforce numbers and/or poor regulatory controls, rather in such cases it may be most effective to conduct a HRIA or at least ensure the range HRs risks are assessed and managed in an integrated manner.
This links to the ‘flexibility’ argument: a corporate HRs dd system must be flexible enough to apply the right level of dd to any particular set of circumstances. In the first instance, do a rapid assessment of the risk profile and a gap analysis against existing controls… is the SIA we’re conducting sufficient to cover the risk, or do we need to consider additional controls, for example? I would argue that only in a very few cases will it be cost effective (i.e. the best way to assess and mitigate against the risk of a human rights abuse) to conduct a full HRIA. My company (oil and gas) has not to date found it necessary to conduct one.