Building understanding

This is the first report of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights (BLIHR), a programme that attempts to help further integrate human rights in business policies and practices. The report describes the work of BLIHR, explores the role of human rights in business conduct, and presents a tool to analyse existing business activities and create a template for understanding opportunities for new action in the human rights field.

The report argues that businesses face both conceptual and practical difficulties when approaching human rights that need to be addressed. The companies participating in the BLIHR programme are opening a dialogue with a range of NGOs, academics, UN institutions and wider business networks to better understand these areas of complexity. They are also engaging with the ‘United Nations Norms on the Responsibilities of Trans-national Corporations and other business enterprises with regard to Human Rights’, with the aim of testing the value of this new tool as a driver for change, and contributing to the work of existing networks and associations committed to promoting human rights in business.

The first tool being developed by the BLIHR programme takes the form of a matrix that puts the range of issues covered by the UN Norms in cross-reference with the ‘essential’, ‘expected’ and ‘desirable’ actions any individual company can take. These include:

• non-negotiable essentials: the minimum obligations that a responsible company is expected to comply with, including:
  • existing labour, environmental, tax and others laws in countries it operates in
  • requirements of market regulators and licence granters (e.g. industry-specific SEC guidelines, industry regulators)
  • government or agency defined requirements (e.g. health and safety regulations, corporate reporting requirements etc.)
• expected: those things that are increasingly expected of a progressive and ‘responsible’ company but are not mandated, such as:
  • public statements and/or policies on social and environmental issues
  • internal processes that support / implement such policies
  • relevant supplier qualification, monitoring and audit programmes
  • public reporting
• desirable: additional voluntary actions that seek to establish positive contributions to society beyond legal and expected requirements of a responsible company, such as:
  • creating positive multipliers along a company’s supply chain
  • strategic philanthropy and social investment
  • public policy dialogue
  • assistance to disadvantaged groups

  [adapted from author]