Companies around the world are increasingly taking action to examine, monitor, and report on how their operations may impact the human rights of stakeholders both at home and abroad. Now new guidance has been published that will allow compliance functions—as well as internal and external audit—to check that their organisations are honouring the spirit of the world’s gold standard on human rights reporting and that the impact that their activities have on human rights issues is being properly monitored, disclosed, and managed.
The bedrock of how companies worldwide should give regard to human rights is set out in the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which were unanimously endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011.
