This entry is from a white paper of the same name published on the website of our sister strategic consulting firm, Enodo Rights.

Companies face an ever-increasing array of risks related to their human rights impacts. These risks are no longer just reputational. Human rights-related legal and financial risks are proliferating in the form of transnational tort suits; regulatory reporting requirements such as the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive, the UK Modern Slavery Act, the US Conflict Minerals Rule, and the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act; public-sector procurement expectations, such as the US Federal Acquisition Regulation; and growing demands by investors and lenders for human rights compliance frameworks as a condition of providing capital.

Responding to these new risks demands a systematic human rights strategy built on a governance program with three baseline elements: a policy commitment to respect human rights; human rights due diligence processes; and remediation processes for adverse impacts. One of the key business-related objectives of such a program is to set corporate human rights priorities in a way that is both practical and principled. Structured prioritization is the key to telling a compelling human rights story to government regulators, courts, investors, and stakeholders. It is also the key to efficient risk management. In pursuit of efficiency, companies need not create human rights governance programs from scratch. Rather, they can leverage existing anti-corruption compliance mechanisms to conduct targeted due diligence and prioritize human rights risk in a way that manages legal, financial, and reputational risk comprehensively.