Human Rights Reporting in the Canadian Mining Sector

In January 2018, Canada’s Ministry of Trade announced the creation of an independent ombudsman—the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE)—to investigate human rights abuses connected to Canadian corporate activity abroad. Additionally, the Ministry enacted a multi-stakeholder Advisory Body to the government and CORE to advise on responsible business conduct abroad.

In light of these developments and the mining sector’s human rights track record, our team has engaged in research analyzing the human rights disclosure of a group of 18 Canadian mining companies (traditional mining companies, along with a number of streaming and royalty companies). Using Shift’s unique maturity methodology, our research revealed strengths and weaknesses of the sector’s reporting trends, which informed our key recommendations. However, the findings and recommendations of this report may have wider-reaching implications for mining companies beyond Canada as well. Undoubtedly, analysis of the Canadian mining sector’s human rights disclosure can be a significant entry point for addressing human rights disclosure, and underlying human rights performance, of the mining industry globally.

Human Rights Reporting in France: Phase I (EN)

In the context of the new Duty of Vigilance Law, Shift’s “Human Rights Reporting in France” aims to evaluate the extent to which the new French legislation brings companies closer to the reporting expectations that were set by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

In Part I, Shift analyzes the maturity of human rights reporting pre plan de vigilance, by examining information from 2017 and early 2018. This report establishes a baseline against which we will evaluate improvement.

Human Rights Reporting in France Introduction to the Series

In the context of the new Duty of Vigilance Law, Shift’s “Human Rights Reporting in France” aims to evaluate the extent to which the new French legislation brings companies closer to the reporting expectations that were set by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This two-part study aims to uncover whether the French Duty of Vigilance Law would have any influence on the maturity of the companies’ public disclosure, as measured against the expectations of the UN GUIDING PRINCIPLES ON BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS (UNGPs).

We hope the key findings from this study can guide companies towards better alignment with the intent of the Duty of Vigilance Law, and the UNGPs, as well as highlight opportunities for ensuring similar legislations fully achieve their intended impact.

Handbook for Lawyers on Business and Human Rights

This handbook, published by the International Bar Association, aims to assist lawyers who seek to integrate business and human rights considerations into the advice they provide to clients in relation to M&A and commercial transactions. The Handbook brings together in one place a diverse collection of educational resources relating to the roles and responsibilities of legal practitioners with respect to business and human rights, including background context and explanation, case scenarios, discussion exercises, frequently asked questions (FAQs), sample checklists and further reading and resources.

The Handbook builds upon the IBA’s Business and Human Rights Guidance for Bar Associations and its Practical Guide on Business and Human Rights for Business Lawyers (Guidance documents), adopted by the IBA Council in 2015 and 2016 respectively. The Guidance documents aim to support the work of bar associations and law societies with respect to business and human rights, and explore the implications of the UN Guiding Principles for lawyers. In late 2016, the IBA’s Business and Human Rights Working Group issued a Supplementary Reference Annex which provides more detail to support the Guidance documents.

Shift’s John Sherman supported the development of this guidance.

Human Rights Reporting: Are Companies Telling Investors What They Need to Know?

Also see: Shift’s reporting program | UNGP Reporting Framework

Failures in governance and lack of appropriate focus still common amongst largest companies

Findings based on our new indicators of maturity for corporate reporting

A key area of focus for us at Shift is corporate human rights reporting. Through our work on the UNGP Reporting Framework and our reporting program, we’re seeing that a smart approach to reporting can be a tremendous driver of improved performance — ultimately leading to real, positive change for people.

As part of our work on this topic, we’ve developed a new methodology to assess the maturity of companies’ reporting on human rights. This methodology, based directly on the expectations set by the UN Guiding Principles and the UNGP Reporting Framework, establishes indicators of mature reporting, distinguishing laggards from leaders along a tiered maturity scale.

Indicators of overall maturity of corporate human rights reporting. Click on the image to see more detail, or see p.10 of the above PDF.

We’ve applied this methodology in the report available on this page, which is an assessment of the maturity of 74 of the world’s largest companies from seven sectors. While the report is primarily targeted at investors, its findings and the maturity indicators can bring value for a range of readers.

Key findings

Our key finding is about the most critical area for improvement: over half of companies provide no clarification about which human rights are most relevant to their operations and value chains. Instead, these companies just refer to certain human rights related issues without any apparent rationale.

This is concerning because it signals that far too many companies are not managing their most severe potential risks to people: neither a good sign for the people affected by the business, nor a signal that the company can create long-term value for investors, severe human rights risks increasingly constitute material business risks as well.

In addition to this top finding, we see a story emerging about various – and for some companies cumulative – failures in the governance of human rights risks, at least based on their disclosure:

  • Lack of oversight: 45% of the companies reviewed do not clearly identify who is responsible and accountable for managing human rights risks.
  • Lack of clarity about internal controls: approximately 90% of the companies do not have a coherent narrative about how risk or impact assessments inform mitigation actions taken, how decisions are made or if senior management is ever involved.
  • Total silence on governance: 16% of the companies provide no information at all about governance of human rights, nor even about governance of broader issues such as “sustainability” or “corporate social responsibility.”

Finally, when we look to actual outcomes, fully 45 percent of companies provide no information whatsoever about how they track their performance on human rights – leaving readers in the dark about whether any of their efforts translate into positive outcomes for people.

Companies’ maturity across the elements of the responsibility to respect human rights. Click on the image to see more detail, or see p.7 of the above PDF.

This study is not a benchmark, ranking or rating. We do not reveal individual companies’ maturity level, but rather focus on trends in corporate reporting: how many companies are least to most mature in the various elements of respecting human rights (according to their own disclosure). Of course we do assess the maturity of individual companies to compile our broader findings. But our purpose here is to drive improvements, not name and shame.

Recommendations for investors and other stakeholders

Based on the analysis conducted for this report, we can derive some overarching elements that can help or hurt the quality of companies’ reporting on human rights. The red flags adjacent to the Do’s and Don’ts are tips for investors about “red flags” to watch out for in corporate reporting. Click on the image to see more detail, or see p.38 of the above PDF.

In addition to this study, our reporting team also writes a short blog-style analysis series, examining trends and sharing insights about the quality of corporate reporting on human rights. This report as well as that insights series are drawn from our UNGP Reporting Database, a public, independent database that shows companies’ human rights-related disclosure mapped to the expectations of the Guiding Principles. Our team of specially trained analysts manually review companies’ entire body of disclosure and offer companies an opportunity to discuss the review with us prior to publishing.

NBIM Workshop Report: Implementing the UN Guiding Principles

This report summarizes the discussions from a half day workshop on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights facilitated by Shift for Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) and investee companies on December 2, 2016 in London. Representatives from 10 investee companies from the apparel and footwear and food and beverage sectors participated in the workshop, along with a number of NBIM staff. The objective of the workshop was to explore the key concepts of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and their practical application to improve human rights risk management.

Doing Business with Respect for Human Rights

This guide is available on its dedicated website, www.businessrespecthumanrights.org. The website features the guide as interactive webpages as well as a downloadable PDF. The multimedia case stories from Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey are also available on the website.

Esta guía también se encuentra disponible en español.

If you need to understand what it means to do business with respect for human rights, look no further than this guide.

“Doing Business With Respect for Human Rights” is a comprehensive guide designed for companies of all sizes, sectors and geographies. It is intended to equip readers with practical advice and real-life examples that help to translate the high-level expectations in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights into concrete action.

The guide is the joint product of the partners in the Global Perspectives Project, an innovative collaboration between the Global Compact Network Netherlands, Oxfam and Shift, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

From 2014 to 2016, the project partners worked with local Oxfam affiliates and Global Compact local networks to deliver workshops in Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey. The workshops brought companies and civil society stakeholders together for frank sharing of perspectives, challenges and ways forward on ensuring greater business respect for human rights.

The resulting guide includes the perspectives of both companies as well as civil society organizations, and draws on learning from those country workshops. It features step-by-step guidance points, pitfalls to avoid and suggestions for small- and medium-sized enterprises. It also includes leading examples of company policies and practices, addresses current discussion topics like the Sustainable Development Goals, and answers tough questions like “Why should companies care about respecting human rights?”. The guide is intended for companies, but should also be useful for their stakeholders, such as civil society organizations and investors.

The guide’s dedicated website (link above) also features multimedia case stories from the four focus countries. These stories share various perspectives about building good relationships with communities around a paper and pulp mill in Indonesia; how a legacy of mistrust with the community damaged the development of a wind farm in Mexico; about making respect for human rights part of a bank’s everyday business in post-apartheid South Africa; and about working to ensure workers’ rights are respected in clothing manufacturing in Turkey.

Business, Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals: Forging a Coherent Vision and Strategy

Also read: News announcement for this report | Our short framework for action on how any company can and should contribute to the SDGs

Update: In January 2017 the Business and Sustainable Development Commission, which commissioned this report, published its position paper on business’s role in sustainable development, Better Business, Better World. That position paper draws on this report and strongly supports its message that respect for human rights must be at the heart of any company’s efforts to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The summary below is excerpted from the report.

Summary

The United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGP) on Business and Human Rights set the global standard for what companies need to do to address negative impacts on people’s human rights connected with their business. The Guiding Principles look at how companies make their profits, not how they spend them. They are not a sign-up proposition, nor an optional extra, but an expectation of all companies everywhere and increasingly viewed as part of soft law.

Yet the UN Guiding Principles are often cast as simply a ‘do no harm’ requirement, a matter of compliance or ‘just the starting point’ en route to more mature or innovative approaches to responsible business. This overlooks their tremendous potential to drive positive change for hundreds of millions of the poorest and most marginalised people in our societies – those least able to enjoy the fruits of development.

One of the most transformative aspects of the UN Guiding Principles is their recognition that a company’s responsibility to respect human rights is not just about what happens in their own operations where they largely control outcomes, but it extends also to human rights impacts connected to their products and services through their networks of business relationships. This often means creating and using leverage in those relationships to bring about greater respect for human rights. For many human rights challenges – particularly those that sit in global value chains – that means collaborating to drive change. This is the key to how business can, and should, make its largest positive contributions to the ‘people part’ of sustainable development.

This paper makes the case for the Business and Sustainable Development Commission (BSDC) to take a lead in changing the current outdated discourse on business and social development, by recognising and harnessing this unique potential of the UNGPs. First it reviews some statistical evidence of the scale of populations across global supply chains that are exposed to abuses of their human rights. It then reviews the evidence of the strong and growing convergence between these severe risks to people and risks to business itself – operational, financial, reputational, legal or in staff recruitment and retention. The subsequent sections explore the increasing attention of international leaders – including in the G7, International Labour Organization (ILO), European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – to human rights risks in global value chains and to the role that implementation of the UNGPs must play if we are to accelerate change. Following a brief review of the UNGPs, the paper explores the evolution in initiatives that use collective leverage to advance respect for human rights. It highlights a new generation of such initiatives in the form of “joint action and accountability platforms”, which focus on specific human rights challenges, involve the key agents of change in setting action-oriented targets that address the issues holistically and incorporate accountability for progress in meeting them.

The final sections of this paper explore why the current discourse on the role of business in social development has skipped over the tremendous scale of positive impacts to be achieved through advancing respect for human rights. They look back at the historical focus on philanthropy and social investment and the more recent preoccupation with new business innovations and models such as “shared value”. The paper argues that while these approaches can bring hugely valuable benefits to societies as well as the companies concerned, they will always remain constrained to certain market opportunities and policy environments.

The paper concludes that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present an opportunity not just to update our vision of the role of business in sustainable development, but to change it fundamentally. There is no more pressing or more powerful way for business to accelerate social development than by driving respect for human rights across their value chains. The proposition that all companies not only can contribute at scale to development through these networks of business relationships, but that they have a responsibility to do so, is the quiet revolution that sits at the heart of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The paper closes with a set of specific recommendations about how to embed this vision at the heart of how business gets done.