The UN Roadmap for the Next Decade of Business and Human Rights: What does it mean for business?
The UN Roadmap for the Next Decade of Business and Human Rights:
What does it mean for business?
At the 10th UN Annual Forum on Business and Human Rights (Forum), the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (UN Working Group) launched a Roadmap for the Next Decade of Business and Human Rights.
Key priorities in the Roadmap include:
building on the recent wave of mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) laws around the world;
translating business commitments into respect for human rights on the ground; and
moving from paper to practice in tackling barriers to accessing effective remedies.
Why did the UN Working Group create the Roadmap?
The Roadmap builds on lessons from the past decade of implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which were reflected in the Working Group’s ten-year Stocktake published earlier this year. The UNGPs are the authoritative global standard on preventing and addressing business-related human rights harms. The Roadmap sets out key action areas for getting closer to fuller realisation of the UNGPs.
At the Forum, experts emphasised the Roadmap’s ambition to create a ‘coalition of the willing’ for global collective action, to mobilise actors from all sectors, and increase the pace of action on business and human rights.
How can businesses use the Roadmap?
The Roadmap outlines steps that both governments and businesses can take to accelerate implementation of the UNGPs over the next decade.
The key action areas for business are:
scale up business uptake and translate commitments to respect into practice;
embed human rights due diligence—the process of knowing and showing that a company respects human rights through its own activities and business relationships—in corporate governance and business models; and
challenge practices that are inconsistent with respect for human rights.
We’ve highlighted some of our key takeaways for business in the graphic below.
Why should businesses use the Roadmap?
The Roadmap can help businesses identify priority areas for their operations and value chains, and provide ideas for how to best evolve their integration of respect for human rights.
The Roadmap also provides an indication of the future trajectory of global action on business and human rights, which can help businesses understand how external expectations as well as policy and regulatory landscapes are likely to evolve over the next decade.
What will happen next with the Roadmap?
The Roadmap is intended to guide multilateral and national action on business and human rights over the next decade. This includes the development of further guidance on implementing the UNGPs from the UN Working Group, coordination between different UN and other multilateral agencies and the development of national and regional business and human rights related laws.
UNGPs 10+ Roadmap: Key takeaways for business
