We help companies and investors design and implement credible human rights strategies.
DESIGN & IMPLEMENT HUMAN RIGHTS POLICIES
Drawing on our backgrounds in human rights law, advocacy and compliance, we work closely with leading companies and investors to design and implement tailored human rights policies aligned with leading international frameworks.
We create standalone human rights policies and help clients embed human rights considerations into other company’s management systems (e.g. compliance, procurement, human resources and grievance mechanisms).
STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
We help clients define their human rights policies and internal processes in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. We lead benchmarking exercises for clients to map out trends among peers and understand emerging best practices, and engage with internal stakeholders to raise awareness of business & human rights issues and ensure buy-in.
Training, implementation and monitoring
We conduct gap analysis and develop action plans to enable clients to achieve their human rights goals, and monitor their progress on implementation. We provide training to senior executives and teams responsible for implementing the action plans, to raise awareness of human rights issues and enable them to put policies into practice.
REPORTING
Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, companies are obliged to “know and show” how they address human rights impacts, to ensure transparency and accountability to stakeholders. Many firms are also subject to evolving regulatory requirements for companies to report on how they conduct human rights due diligence, as well as voluntary initiatives that require signatories to report.
We assist with preparing human rights sections of annual and sustainability reports for internal and external stakeholders, as well as disclosures in line with GRI and other reporting standards.
TRUSTED Advisors
We work continuously with clients to help them implement their human rights strategy and stay in front of emerging risks in their operations and value chains. We leverage our regional expertise to act as a trusted advisor on diverse business & human rights issues, from analysing business responses to state-led human rights abuses in Myanmar, to cataloguing Ukrainian human rights defenders and journalists in need of additional protections on social media platforms. We regularly complete bespoke research projects to provide our clients with the specialised knowledge they need to identify the most at-risk rightsholders and prevent human rights abuses.
CASE STUDY: HUMAN RIGHTS GAP ANALYSIS FOR CHEMICALS COMPANY
On behalf of a global chemicals company, we mapped and ranked salient human rights risks and the company’s management of these risks, and made recommendations based on best practice. We integrated the risks into the company’s existing enterprise risk matrix (ERM), mitigation processes and controls. Parallel to this, we engaged with the C-Suite and other senior leadership through 1-1 sessions to understand their perspective on key human rights risks in the business and provide training on business & human rights topics.