Introduction to the UNGPs /
Discovering the UNGPs for the first time? /
If you have heard about the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, also often referred to as “The Guiding Principles” or simply, the “UNGPs”, you’ve also probably heard that they are the authoritative global standard on business and human rights. But, what do the Guiding Principles say? What do you need to know about them?
Watch this video /
An Introduction to the UN Guiding Principles
If you want to dive in and learn more, these are good places to start: /
Take this free online course for beginners on how companies can operationalize the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Read this interactive guide (or download it as a PDF) to learn about the core concepts in the UNGPs and how companies are implementing them.
A brief history of the UN Guiding Principles /
In 2005, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Harvard professor John Ruggie as his Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights. Ruggie’s mandate was to identify and clarify standards of responsibility and accountability for business-related impacts on human rights, occurring in company’s own operations and in their global value chains. Over six years, Professor Ruggie and his team conducted extensive research all around the world, including through nearly 50 international consultations. That effort ultimately led to what became the authoritative global standard for preventing and addressing business-related adverse human rights impacts: the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
The UNGPs were unanimously endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. But their legitimacy also comes from the broad consensus that was built through Ruggie’s global consultative process with governments, business, civil society and international organizations. The UNGPs create a common language for speaking about the respective roles of states and businesses in preventing and addressing negative impacts on people that can result from business activities.
The UN Guiding Principles apply to all states and all businesses worldwide. While they are a soft law standard, over the years since their endorsement, they have influenced government, business and civil society practice around the world and informed a growing number of mandatory standards. For example, fifteen years on from their endorsement we see that:
- Governments across all regions have adopted national action plans for implementing the UNGPs, followed by a growing number of regulatory initiatives designed to embed their expectations within reporting and human rights due diligence laws;
- Companies, business associations, investor and banking groups have made commitments and developed sector-specific guidance grounded in the UNGPs, with increasing movement beyond policy adoption and initial impact assessment towards action to prevent, mitigate and remedy harms;
- Multi-stakeholder initiatives have emerged to address shared human rights challenges, bringing together diverse actors around a common set of expectations rooted in the UNGPs;
- Complaints mechanisms and legal actions in national and regional courts have increasingly cited the UNGPs in pursuit of remedy for people harmed by business activity.
The Guiding Principles are a transformational roadmap to a future where the billions of people whose lives are impacted by corporate activities are treated with respect for their dignity and fundamental welfare – a world where human beings and corporations alike can thrive and prosper.”
Professor John Ruggie
The three pillars /
The UNGPs are built on the three-pillar “Protect, Respect and Remedy” framework, also developed by Professor Ruggie:
FAQs about the UNGPs /
The idea of human rights is as simple as it is powerful: that people have a right to be treated with dignity. Being treated with dignity is the foundation for leading a decent life. Human rights are therefore inherent to all people as human beings, and not something that governments are free to grant or take away in the way they might do with other legal rights.
What are human rights?
Human rights include rights to life and physical security, rights to freedom of thought, expression and religion, freedom of association and of movement, rights to education and work, to family life and privacy, to food and water, freedoms from torture, slavery or forced labor, rights to fair and decent work conditions and non-discrimination.
These and other internationally recognized human rights are set out in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN following the atrocities of the Second World War. Since then, all states have expressed support for this Declaration. These human rights are elaborated in more detail in two UN conventions (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) and in the Declaration on Fundamental Rights and Principles at Work of the International Labour Organization.
How are human rights relevant for companies?
Companies can have many positive impacts on human rights, including through the provision of decent jobs and broader contributions to growth and the development of societies. Some industries advance human rights in specific ways, such as supporting freedom of expression through information and communication technologies, supporting health by making new medicines available and accessible, or advancing development by bringing new roads and water supplies to poor communities.
Yet companies can also clearly be involved with negative impacts on human rights.
- Companies may cause negative impacts, for example if staff suffer physical or mental injuries due to unsafe working conditions, or if companies displace communities from their lands and livelihoods without due process and compensation;
- Companies may contribute to negative impacts, for example if their purchasing practices incentivize suppliers to force workers into unpaid overtime to meet contract requirements, or if multiple companies drain or pollute the water resources essential for local communities’ drinking supply;
- Companies’ operations, products or services may be linked to negative impacts through their business relationships in their value chains, for example if forced labor or child labor is used to harvest ingredients or make components that go into their products or if a technology company’s equipment is used by government security forces to track, imprison and harm end-users, despite the company’s reasonable efforts to avoid these outcomes.
The Guiding Principles make clear that all companies everywhere have a responsibility to respect human rights, which means to avoid having negative impacts on them and to address such impacts where they do occur. This responsibility applies to their own operations and to all their business relationships throughout their value chain.
Aren’t states primarily responsible for human rights?
It is states that negotiate and sign up to international conventions and which then have the obligation to translate them into domestic laws and enforcement processes. Their duties include respecting human rights in what they do as states, protecting human rights against abuse by others (including private sector actors), and fulfilling human rights over time where that requires considerable resources, for example in providing access to education or clean water.
The corporate responsibility to respect human rights does not increase or decrease depending on whether states meet their own duty to protect human rights. It is, of course, much more challenging for companies to meet this responsibility when states do not have adequate standards and regulations in place, fail to enforce them effectively or even have laws that directly conflict with international human rights standards.
That means that all businesses should put in place appropriate policies and processes in a proactive effort to respect human rights. And those businesses that operate or have parts of their value chain in countries where governments fail to fulfill their own duties to protect human rights will need to make additional efforts to respect human rights in light of the risky environment.
How do businesses prevent negative impacts on human rights?
Businesses need to have the right policies and processes in place in order to try to prevent these impacts and to respond appropriately should they occur. The Guiding Principles provide a blueprint for them to do so.
That blueprint describes a three part approach that can be summarized as:
- A public commitment to respect human rights that is embedded into a business’s governance and culture;
- An ongoing process of human rights due diligence through which the business assesses risks to human rights, integrates the findings into its decision making and actions in order to mitigate the risks, tracks the effectiveness of these measures, and communicates its efforts internally and externally;
- Processes for providing for or contributing to remedy for anyone who is harmed where the business caused or contributed to that harm.
But the world is big and complex, and there will probably always be human rights harms going on. how can a company be expected to change that?
The Guiding Principles fundamentally changed our understanding of what we can all reasonably expect of business. They did this by recognizing that the responsibility to respect human rights is tied to impacts on people and not to how much influence a business has in a given context or relationship. They call on businesses to work to prevent and address human rights harms in connection with their own operations and value chain. If the company did not cause or contribute to the impact, and if the impact is not linked to the company’s operations, products or services through a business relationship, then the company does not have a responsibility to address it (though of course it may choose to do so for many other reasons). So the Guiding Principles put some boundaries on what companies are responsible for.
At the same time, within the scope of impacts occurring in a company’s operations and value chain, the Guiding Principles expect companies to undertake ongoing due diligence. Due diligence means making credible efforts to prevent and address harms, including where the company does not control a situation and may feel it lacks the ability to change things.
Due diligence also means getting better with time – including making sure the company learns from failures and blind spots, and pushing the envelope about what’s possible through innovative approaches and collaborations to increase the company’s leverage (influence) to try to prevent harms. Collaboration is particularly important where a business is confronted with systemic human rights abuses that it cannot fix alone. By connecting with others and using their collective leverage, real change can happen.
For example, more than a decade ago, companies initially said they couldn’t do anything about the fact that minerals they were using from parts of central Africa were financing conflict in that region – since then, thanks to collaborative efforts, companies have shown they can trace the source of their materials, and regularly collaborate with others to source responsibly from the region. Before the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh in 2013, many apparel companies were carrying out numerous audits on working conditions in garment manufacturing factories, but systemic weaknesses in worker protections meant many workers were still suffering under unsafe working conditions. Since then, the Bangladesh Accord has helped to drive real change in how apparel gets manufactured in Bangladesh – and now the International Accord builds on that model for other jurisdictions. These collaborative initiatives don’t lead to major changes overnight – but they can lead to real impact over time for people whose human rights are harmed.
The guiding principles talk about “respect” for human rights and they say that companies can’t “offset” human rights harms with philanthropy. Why can’t positive impacts also “count” when it comes to respecting human rights?
Respecting human rights is positive and it does “count” – but it is about how a company makes its profits, not how it spends those profits. Donating computers to a school, building a health clinic or enabling staff to volunteer in the local community can be beneficial to society. But if the same company overlooks harassment in its workplace, child labor in its supply chains, or harm to health from its products, no beneficial acts can cancel or reduce that reality.
By contrast, when a company takes a hard look at its own impacts on people, and takes real steps to ensure its activities are respectful of those people, it helps prevent negative impacts and can also have a truly positive effect on people’s lives.
When a company works to drive diversity and inclusion through its workplaces, it not only reduces risks of discrimination but can open opportunities for women, minorities and others and help change attitudes in society. When a company collaborates with others to tackle forced labor or poverty wages in its supply chain, it both reduces risks of abuses and helps workers around the world begin to build lives with dignity and opportunity for themselves and their families. When a company builds a new dam or digs a mine following meaningful dialogue with communities to gain their consent, rather than trusting a government’s hasty claim that the land was “uninhabited,” it protects people from dispossession and empowers them to have a say in decisions that affect them.
Respect is positive, it is transformative, it is essential. It is the hallmark of a lasting and future-ready, competitive company.
Shift and the UN Guiding Principles /
Did you know that Shift was founded by members of Professor Ruggie’s team? Our founders played a key role in conceptualizing and drafting the UNGPs. Now, Shift works with governments, businesses and key stakeholders to put them into practice.
Pillar 1: The state duty to protect /
The first pillar of the Guiding Principles provides recommendations on how states can meet their existing international human rights obligations to protect against business-related human rights abuses by creating an environment that is conducive to business respect for human rights, including by:
- Working to achieve greater legal and policy coherence between their human rights obligations and their actions with respect to business, including by enforcing existing laws, identifying and addressing any regulatory gaps, using a range of policy tools to incentivize business respect for human rights and providing effective guidance to business;
- Fostering business respect for human rights both at home and abroad in how their companies act outside the jurisdiction;
- Taking particular measures to ensure human rights are respected where there is a close nexus between the state and business such as ownership or when a state conducts commercial transactions with business (such as through government procurement or the provision of trade or export credit support);
- Helping ensure that businesses operating in conflict-affected areas do not commit or contribute to serious human rights abuses;
- Fulfilling their duty to protect when they participate in multilateral institutions (e.g., World Bank, OECD) with other states.
Pillar 2: The corporate responsibility to respect /
The second pillar of the Guiding Principles provides a blueprint for businesses to prevent and address negative human rights impacts connected to their operations and value chains. That blueprint describes a three part approach that can be summarized as:
- A public commitment to respect human rights that is embedded into a business’s governance and culture;
- An ongoing process of human rights due diligence through which the business assesses risks to human rights, integrates the findings into its decision making and actions in order to mitigate the risks, tracks the effectiveness of these measures, and communicates its efforts internally and externally; Processes for providing for or contributing to remedy for anyone who is harmed where the business caused or contributed to that harm.
- Human rights due diligence is a risk management approach – but the focus is on risk to people, not just risk to the business;
- The responsibility to respect human rights extends across a company’s own operations and all of its business relationships throughout its value chain;
- Compliance with local law may not be sufficient to meet the expectations of the Guiding Principles;
- Companies cannot offset negative impacts on people by “doing good,” such as through philanthropy or staff volunteering.
Pillar 3: Access to remedy /
Even where states and business do their best to implement the Guiding Principles, negative human rights impacts may still result from a company’s operations or its actions or omissions in its value chain relationships. People who are harmed need to be able to seek redress through effective judicial and non-judicial grievance mechanisms. The third pillar of the Guiding Principles sets out the respective roles of states and companies in relation to remedy:
- As part of their duty to protect, states must take appropriate steps to ensure that when business-related human rights harms occur, those who are affected have access to effective judicial and non-judicial state-based grievance mechanisms;
- Non-state-based grievance mechanisms should complement state-based mechanisms. This includes mechanisms at the operational level (meaning that companies are involved in implementing them), or as part of multistakeholder initiatives or international institutions;
- All non-judicial grievance mechanisms should meet key effectiveness criteria by being legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, transparent, rights-compatible, a source of continuous learning, and (in the case of corporate operational-level mechanisms) being based on dialogue and engagement.
