Piloting Principles for Effective Company-Stakeholders Grievance Mechanisms: A Report of Lessons Learned

This study reflects the findings of five on-the-ground pilot projects to examine what constitutes effective non-judicial grievance mechanisms. Its findings led to the eight principles of effectiveness for non-judicial grievance mechanisms, which are reflected in Guiding Principle 31 as the “effectiveness criteria.” The criteria are: legitimacy, accessibility, predictability, equitability, transparency, rights-compatibility, dialogue and engagement, continuous learning.

The summary below is excerpted from the resource.

Summary

This report sets out key lessons learned from a pilot project conducted in 2009-2010 to test the practical applicability of a set of principles for effective non-judicial grievance mechanisms that address complaints or disputes involving businesses and their stakeholders. The principles were developed by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises and set out in his reports to the Human Rights Council in 2008 (A/HRC/8/5) and 2009 (A/HRC/11/13).

The project was conducted on behalf of the Special Representative to help refine these principles in advance of their incorporation into a wider set of Guiding principles on business and human rights (A/HRC/17/31), which the Special Representative will present to the Human Rights Council in June 2011. The project focused on operational-level grievance mechanisms – that is, mechanisms developed by companies with/for stakeholders affected by their operations. The companies involved in the four main pilots to design or revise grievance mechanisms in line with the Special Representative’s principles were Carbones del Cerrejón, a coal mine in Colombia; Esquel Group, a Hong Kong-based garment company, working with its wholly-owned supplier in Viet Nam; Sakhalin Energy Investment Corporation, an oil and gas company in the Russian Federation; and Tesco Stores Ltd, a United Kingdom-based multinational supermarket chain, working with suppliers in South Africa. An adjunct project with Hewlett-Packard and two of its suppliers in China retrospectively analyzed their collaborative efforts to enhance suppliers’ grievance mechanisms and reviewed them in light of the Special Representative’s principles.

The purpose of the pilot project was to test the benefits of grievance mechanisms that are aligned with the Special Representative’s principles, and to learn lessons about how the principles could be further refined to reflect operational realities and enable their practical application. The extensive time spent in the process of designing or revising the grievance mechanisms meant that there was little time to monitor their operation in practice. Any such review will require further work in future. However, substantial lessons were gained from the processes undertaken. Those that are of most general relevance are summarized in this overarching report, while more specific and detailed learning is reflected in the individual reports of each project, which are attached in Annexes A to E.

  • Section I of this report expands on the background and purpose of the project, defines what is meant by “operational-level grievance mechanisms,” and sets out the principles that were tested.
  • Section II describes the methodology for the four main pilots (the separate methodology of the adjunct project is described in that specific report at Annex E).
  • Section III reflects cross-cutting lessons learned, setting them out under each principle in turn, and concluding with an explanation of how the principle was adjusted to reflect the learning (adjustments were limited to the extent that they had to be applicable, not only to operational-level mechanisms, but also to other kinds of non-judicial mechanisms covered by the principles).
  • Section IV offers a brief conclusion, and sets out the principles as revised.

Human Rights Translated: A Business and Reference Guide

This comprehensive, baseline resource for businesses lays out what human rights are and how businesses can impact them. With an effort to make language understandable for people working in companies, the guide includes case studies, quotes, suggested practical actions companies can take and links to further resources. It is published by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The resource complements the Guiding Principles by explaining the content of the “internationally recognized human rights” as referenced in the Guiding Principles. This guide was published before the Guiding Principles, but its explanations of internationally recognized human rights are of course still valid today. However, the suggested practical actions should be understood as having been developed prior to the standard set by the Guiding Principles.

This resource also provides a basis for shorter guidance developed by Shift and Mazars to support the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework.

Protect, Respect and Remedy: A Framework for Business and Human Rights

The summary is excerpted from the resource.

Summary

The international community is still in the early stages of adapting the human rights regime to provide more effective protection to individuals and communities against corporate-related human rights harm. This report to the Human Rights Council presents a principles-based conceptual and policy framework intended to help achieve this aim.

Business is the major source of investment and job creation, and markets can be highly efficient means for allocating scarce resources. They constitute powerful forces capable of generating economic growth, reducing poverty, and increasing demand for the rule of law, thereby contributing to the realization of a broad spectrum of human rights. But markets work optimally only if they are embedded within rules, customs and institutions. Markets themselves require these to survive and thrive, while society needs them to manage the adverse effects of market dynamics and produce the public goods that markets undersupply. Indeed, history teaches us that markets pose the greatest risks – to society and business itself – when their scope and power far exceed the reach of the institutional underpinnings that allow them to function smoothly and ensure their political sustainability. This is such a time and escalating charges of corporate-related human rights abuses are the canary in the coal mine, signalling that all is not well.

The root cause of the business and human rights predicament today lies in the governance gaps created by globalization – between the scope and impact of economic forces and actors, and the capacity of societies to manage their adverse consequences. These governance gaps provide the permissive environment for wrongful acts by companies of all kinds without adequate sanctioning or reparation. How to narrow and ultimately bridge the gaps in relation to human rights is our fundamental challenge.

The business and human rights debate currently lacks an authoritative focal point. Claims and counter-claims proliferate, initiatives abound, and yet no effort reaches significant scale. Amid this confusing mix, laggards – States as well as companies – continue to fly below the radar.

Some stakeholders believe that the solution lies in a limited list of human rights for which companies would have responsibility, while extending to companies, where they have influence, essentially the same range of responsibilities as States. For reasons this report spells out, the Special Representative has not adopted this formula. Briefly, business can affect virtually all internationally recognized rights. Therefore, any limited list will almost certainly miss one or more rights that may turn out to be significant in a particular instance, thereby providing misleading guidance. At the same time, as economic actors, companies have unique responsibilities. If those responsibilities are entangled with State obligations, it makes it difficult if not impossible to tell who is responsible for what in practice. Hence, this report pursues the more promising path of addressing the specific responsibilities of companies in relation to all rights they may impact.

There is no single silver bullet solution to the institutional misalignments in the business and human rights domain. Instead, all social actors – States, businesses, and civil society – must learn to do many things differently. But those things must cohere and become cumulative, which makes it critically important to get the foundation right.

Every stakeholder group, despite their other differences, has expressed the urgent need for a common conceptual and policy framework, a foundation on which thinking and action can build. 

The framework rests on differentiated but complementary responsibilities. It comprises three core principles:

  • the State duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business;
  • the corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and
  • the need for more effective access to remedies.

Each principle is an essential component of the framework: the State duty to protect because it lies at the very core of the international human rights regime; the corporate responsibility to respect because it is the basic expectation society has of business; and access to remedy, because even the most concerted efforts cannot prevent all abuse, while access to judicial redress is often problematic, and non-judicial means are limited in number, scope and effectiveness. The three principles form a complementary whole in that each supports the others in achieving sustainable progress.

Mapping Grievance Mechanisms in the Business and Human Rights Arena

Please note that this resource was published in 2008 and there have been a number of new non-judicial mechanisms developed since that time, and some of the mechanisms described in this resource have refined their processes. The summary here is excerpted from the resource.

Summary 

This report examines the strengths and weaknesses of existing grievance mechanisms in order to highlight lessons to be drawn from their experience, consider how they might be improved and explore what model mechanisms might look like for the field of business and human rights.

This mapping sets out in summary form a range of existing grievance mechanisms from a variety of different contexts, whether industry or multi-industry, national, regional or international, private or public, based on law or voluntary standards. The aim here is to describe the mechanisms as factually as possible in order to provide a platform for further analysis as to how effective these mechanisms are and how well they are implemented in practice, but such judgments are not the purpose of this work.

The common denominator among the mechanisms is that they a) address the impacts of corporations, b) explicitly or implicitly reference human rights and c) are non-judicial. Their purpose is to find resolutions to grievances outside the judicial process for various reasons such as cost saving, time saving, a desire to avoid confrontation and a need to protect the integrity of an institution or initiative.

The report includes a review of the following grievance mechanisms:

Company Level

  • BTC Pipeline/BP, Azerbaijan
  • Gap Inc., Lesotho
  • Hewlett-Packard, Mexico
  • Xstrata Copper, Peru

Industry Level

  • Clear Voice Hotline
  • Fair Labor Association
  • Fair Wear Foundation
  • International Council of Toy Industries
  • Voluntary Principles Security & Human Rights
  • Workers Rights Consortium

Multi-Industry Level

  • Ethical Trading Initiative
  • Social Accountability International

National Level

  • National Human Rights Institutions: India, Kenya, New Zealand
  • Labor Dispute Systems: Cambodia, South Africa, United Kingdom

Regional Level

  • African Development Bank
  • Asian Development Bank
  • European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
  • Inter-American Development Bank

International Level

  • Global Union Federations/TNCs
  • International Labour Organization
  • Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development
  • United Nations Global Compact
  • World Bank Group – Office of the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman
  • World Bank Group – Inspection Panel