What Do the UN Guiding Principles Mean for Business?

Kate Larsen

20 years: Human Rights and Supply Chains

So what are businesses actually expected to do under the UNGPs? Join Kate Larsen as she explores this in depth.

Supply Chains

So what are businesses actually expected to do under the UNGPs? Join Kate Larsen as she explores this in depth.

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What Do the UN Guiding Principles Mean for Business?

8 mins 15 secs

Key learning objectives:

Outline what the UNGPs expect of businesses
Identify examples of how businesses can meet the guidelines

Overview:

Businesses are expected to implement policies, engage with stakeholders, assess human rights risks, investigate their supply chains, mitigate the chance of human rights breaches, remediate if they have occurred and then track all of their progress on what worked and what didn’t.

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Summary

What do the UNGPs expect of businesses?

1. Policies

This includes policies on labour standards, anti-slavery and purchasing practices.

2. Engagement

Businesses are expected to engage stakeholders, especially those deemed most vulnerable. For example, engaging translators to conduct interviews with migrant workers.

3. Assessing

Businesses are expected to assess and map where risks to the human rights of people in their value chains may lie.

4. Investigation

Businesses are expected to investigate the conditions of their supply chains. For example, a bank would do this by assessing if funds they are managing may have been generated money by modern slavery.

5. Mitigation

Businesses are expected to mitigate human rights breaches. For example, Tony's Chocolonely built in fairer premium pricing for cocoa farmers to mitigate and prevent the risk of child labour.

6. Remediation

Businesses are expected to remediate human rights breaches. For example, delivering backpay or apologising for poor treatment.

7. Tracking

Businesses are expected to track all the areas they are assessing, engaging, influencing, causing and verifying human rights risks, and to report on what worked and what didn’t.

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Kate Larsen

Kate Larsen is a Director at SupplyESChange advising and training Investors and Companies on Environmental and Social issues of ESG, especially, human rights risk management in global supply chains. She has worked over 20 years on supply chain ESG including leading Asia Corporate Responsibility in the UK FTSE100 company Burberry and as a Global Director Responsible Sourcing in a US Nasdaq listed retailer.

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