Due Diligence for Human Rights: A Risk-Based Approach

What does it mean in practice for a company to respect human rights? The paper examines the operational implications of a “corporate responsibility to respect human rights”, a pillar of the recent framework put forward by UN SRSG John Ruggie under the title “Protect, Respect and Remedy”. The authors define an approach to due diligence based on assessing the risk of company involvement in human rights violations. The authors draw on the work of StatoilHydro in developing a human rights risk assessment method for its global operations and argue that due diligence and risk are proven approaches to guarding against social harm by companies. The paper outlines a practical approach to human rights due diligence based on the assumption that the nature of a company’s business activities and relationships decides the environment of human rights risk in which the company must operate. The authors argue that companies are able to exercise greater control over their exposure to human right related risk than generally assumed possible and that an empirically-grounded, risk-based approach to due diligence permits companies to more effectively manage their responsibility to respect human rights and their responsibility to turn a profit.