Introduction to Human Rights Due Diligence

Companies are at risk of causing, contributing or being linked to adverse human rights impacts. This module is designed to enhance students' understanding of what human rights are, why they’re important in a business context, and how a human rights lens offers a useful perspective to company decision-making. This section will also help practitioners understand the differences between social performance and human rights practice.

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are widely recognised as the global normative framework for addressing business’ impact on human rights. The UNGPs set out a company’s responsibility to avoid infringing on people’s rights and to address negative impacts on people with which they are involved. This module provides an outline of the UNGPs’ three pillars, with a particular focus on Pillars II and III, as they pertain to the company responsibility to respect human rights and remedy harm. Students will learn a brief history of the UNGPs and how the framework was developed, how businesses can show respect for human rights, how to draft a credible company statement and practical human rights policy, and what the UNGPs say about human rights due diligence and access to remedy.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in human rights–based legislation and regulation at a global level, including laws mandating human rights due diligence processes that extend through a company’s operations and supply chain. This module focuses on the changing regulatory landscape and maps the current and emerging obligations on companies, and what these mean in practice. 

This module will cover what Pillar II of the UNGPs says about implementing HRDD as well as the foundational principles that guide HRDD practice. In this module, students will learn about how HRDD is different from other risk management systems that businesses commonly use, as well as how to evaluate business maturity with regards to existing HRDD processes and systems. 

Identifying and assessing salient human rights impacts is fundamental to companies’ practical efforts towards meeting their responsibility to respect and manage their human rights impacts. Through this module, students will learn about the UNGPs’ expectations for identifying and assessing human rights impacts and work through practical methods for undertaking such assessments, as well as how to integrate findings into business processes.

The UNGPs expect companies to integrate findings from impact assessments across all relevant functions and processes, who are in turn expected to take action. This module provides students with a better understanding of how human rights can be integrated within existing business processes and across functions. Students will be guided through a range of approaches to best achieve integration. 

Expectations on companies to understand the human rights risks associated with the actors and processes in their supply chain is increasing. Through this module, students will understand the key human rights issues in supply chain management and work through a practical step-by-step approach to prevent, mitigate and, where appropriate, remediate impacts associated with their supply chain and business relationships. Students will additionally work through why, when, and how businesses should undertake “heightened” HRDD. 

Even where companies do their best to implement the UNGPs, negative human rights impacts may still result from their operations. The third pillar of the UNGPs sets out the ways in which affected people may seek redress and a company’s responsibility to provide effective access to remedy in these cases.