June 16, 2026
This essay is part of Shift’s series marking the 15th anniversary of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
By Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein*
In 2015, when I was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, I described the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) as “the global authoritative standard, providing a blueprint for the steps all states and businesses should take to uphold human rights.” Fifteen years since their unanimous endorsement by the UN Human Rights Council, their wide-ranging influence confirms their authority and their blueprint has been relied on by many different types of organizations – including in some novel contexts like global sports bodies.
The UNGPs have achieved incredible traction as an international norm in just over a decade, evolving from their original articulation as soft law through a UN resolution, to an increasingly hard law standard, most notably in the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. This is just what they were intended to do.
The growth in mandatory due diligence and reporting laws, which extends well beyond Europe, helps set a foundation for accelerating both corporate action on, and accountability for, human rights impacts related to companies’ operations and global value chains. The UNGPs have already changed mindsets and practices across a wide range of sectors and geographies. This includes contexts that were not specifically foreseen when they were adopted, such as sports or the responsible use of AI, demonstrating their broad applicability and enduring relevance.
Of course, over the same period since the UNGPs were endorsed, our world has grown less stable and more unequal. In today’s landscape, when the legitimacy of international institutions is being challenged, regional power blocs are consolidating and societies are increasingly polarised, upholding respect for human rights has become both more challenging and more urgent. There is now an even greater need to look at the impacts that private organizations of all kinds have in the daily lives of people, and how actions to respect human rights can both prevent and address harms to, and drive positive outcomes for, workers, communities and consumers.
Bringing human rights into global sport
The author of the UNGPs, the late Professor John Ruggie, helped pioneer their application in one particularly influential context – the operations of global sports bodies. As Ruggie put it in his 2016 report applying the UNGPs to FIFA:
“The prevailing social expectations of organizations with a footprint as large as FIFA’s, which wield great economic power and exert significant political influence, is that they must become more transparent and more accountable. Nowhere is this more pressing than in relation to human rights—which, quite apart from hard and soft law standards, have become the vernacular spoken by people everywhere to affirm and assert their human dignity. The social legitimacy of FIFA and similar organizations, and therefore their business model, hinges on their embracing this new world, and incorporating its rules into their own.”
In 2018, following my term as UN High Commissioner, I began conversations with Thomas Bach, then President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), about the relevance of human rights to the IOC’s mission. We talked in particular about the imperative of addressing the serious harassment and abuse athletes experience across a wide range of sports – from gymnastics to skating, from judo to showjumping – and the lack of accountability for those harms, among others.
In parallel, the IOC had been working with Shift at the operational level to review and strengthen its existing human rights work. This support was led by Rachel Davis. In early 2019, we teamed up when Bach asked us to make recommendations for a strategic framework on human rights for the organization. Later, we were asked by Jean Todt, then President of the FIA (the global governing body for motorsports), to do likewise for his organization. This essay, however, focuses on the IOC where we had deeper and more sustained engagement.
Working with the IOC
Between us, we had zero gold medals! But we had the benefit of learning from directly affected stakeholders, including individual Olympians and other athletes, and from expert organizations, including NGO and trade union members of the Sports and Rights Alliance. We benefitted from extensive internal consultation across IOC departments as well as the personal support of Bach for the work we were doing. His willingness to sit down with us repeatedly during the process and debate key aspects was essential to both the robustness of our final report and the organization’s receptivity to it.
At their core, human rights are about valuing and ensuring individual dignity. Respect for peoples’ dignity is fundamental to the IOC’s values and its mission of advancing Olympism. Yet while the IOC had some important work underway, it lacked a clear understanding of the scope of its responsibility for preventing and addressing impacts, particularly in its role as leader of the Olympic movement. Like many other organizations, it also lacked internal mechanisms to follow up on commitments and hold its partners accountable – including National Olympic Committees and Organizing Committees of nations hosting the Olympic Games. The persistence of media reports about harms associated with sport, and the predictable human rights risks involved in hosting the Olympic Games, showed that more work was needed.
Turning principles into practice
As with any organizational change exercise, there were differences in perspective and we had some direct and difficult exchanges. While the UNGPs provide a blueprint for how an organization should manage its human rights risks, putting them into practice requires socialization with the people in that organization who are going to be accountable for overseeing and conducting human rights due diligence. That means engaging with and convincing people to adopt things that aren’t familiar to them by understanding their unique perspectives and concerns. It means showing how human rights due diligence will help them and their organization and, of course, how it will lead to positive impact for their most important stakeholders – athletes, in the case of the IOC.
I can confidently say, with the weight of experience, that people don’t typically associate ‘fun’ with ‘human rights work’. Yet while many of our conversations were naturally quite serious, we also enjoyed the many fascinating and insightful discussions we had inside and outside the organization. I believe our approach helped us persuade those we engaged with that what we were doing wasn’t a moralistic, finger-pointing exercise but something very different; it was intended to help the organization more closely align with its values and protect its standing in the world, as well as to deliver better outcomes for affected stakeholders.
Bach decided to publish our final report in full. The IOC then adopted an overarching Strategic Framework on Human Rights grounded in our recommendations, and integrated a commitment to respect human rights into the Olympic Charter. Since then, the organization has taken a number of steps to implement this commitment. These included its ground-breaking Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination intended to ensure respect for the rights of transgender and intersex athletes including through meaningful consultation with them, and strengthening internal capacity to provide safeguarding measures to protect athletes from harassment and abuse during Games-time as well as promoting safeguarding efforts throughout the Olympic movement by providing training and resources.
The IOC also established an Advisory Committee on Human Rights and increased transparency through human rights reporting using the recognised standard of the Global Reporting Initiative, alongside deeper engagement with key human rights stakeholders. Bach’s leadership was instrumental to these developments.
Other global sports bodies have started to engage more seriously with the topic of human rights as well. The important work of the Centre for Sport and Human Rights (CSHR) was and remains central to driving this wider progress. CSHR works with all actors across the sports ecosystem to advance responsible sport in line with the UNGPs – sport that truly respects people. Their database tracks the growing number of human rights commitments by sports bodies and they have engaged with sports bodies ranging from UEFA at the EURO 2024 in Germany to the Supreme Committee for the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar to support the application of the UNGPs.
And NGOs and trade unions continue to push for change, including through the work of the Sport and Rights Alliance. Most recently, FIFA signed a collaboration agreement with the international trade union for construction workers, Building and Woodworkers International (BWI): a practical commitment with real potential for protecting the rights of workers. The agreement commits FIFA to work with BWI on joint inspections on future FIFA World Cup sites, including in the lead up to Saudi Arabia in 2034 – a country where trade unions are banned.
New challenges for sport
Yet the task of embedding respect for human rights across global sport is far from complete. New challenges continue to test how far sports bodies are prepared to translate their commitments into action.
Sports bodies are not only commercial actors in their role as convenors of major sporting events; they are political entities too in their governance role for a particular sport or, in the case of the IOC, for the Olympic movement. The dynamics affecting politics today are naturally affecting sports bodies as well.
We see this in their public silence about predictable human rights impacts connected with the FIFA World Cup being held this June in the US, Canada and Mexico, which will also affect the Olympic Games being held in LA in 2028. These include risks to journalists, to transgender and non-binary athletes and fans, and to workers with undocumented immigration status.
And we see it in the recent replacement of the IOC’s nuanced Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination with mandatory gender testing for all female athletes who ultimately want to compete in the Olympic Games, starting with LA28. There are serious questions about the human rights risks the new policy may pose, including to young girls, given the capacity constraints of many national bodies that will have to administer it.
The enduring relevance of the UNGPs
These are real setbacks. But while the broader political atmosphere may have reduced the space for careful and nuanced approaches to certain human rights issues, a great deal of quiet work is still continuing. It does so because the significant human rights issues connected to major sporting events, to the governance of sports, and to the global reputations of sporting bodies, will not go away.
This continued momentum rests on the broad credibility and applicability of the UNGPs. Fifteen years after their endorsement, they continue to provide a practical framework that has repeatedly proven its value for understanding and addressing impacts on people, wherever they occur. Importantly, they not only emphasize the duties of governments to protect people’s human rights and address harms when the activities of private organizations, including sports bodies, fall below human rights standards; they are also clear that private organizations have a distinct responsibility to respect human rights, independent of whether governments play their role.
As organizations that hold a significant role in public life, sporting bodies’ own interests are inextricably linked to respect for human rights. Their status in our societies rests on the underlying proposition of the value of sport: that it brings people together instead of dividing them, and that it offers inspiration and inclusion to all.
These values are at odds with societies characterized by high and growing inequalities, by the undermining of human dignity, the rule of law, public participation in decision-making, and access to shared resources. They are compromised where human rights harms contribute to grievance, economic disparity, social division and conflict. The UNGPs provide the enduring compass for sports bodies to act as a counterweight to those dynamics. By doing so, they can better protect their organizational reputation and social license and better demonstrate their core values of respect for human dignity.
* Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein is President and CEO of the International Peace Institute (IPI), Perry World House Professor of Practice of Law and Human Rights at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and Chair of Shift’s Board of Trustees. He served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2014 to 2018 and is a member of The Elders, the independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela. A distinguished diplomat and leading advocate for universal human rights, Prince Zeid played a central role in the establishment of the International Criminal Court and has dedicated his career to advancing international justice, peace and human dignity.
