Human Rights

Introduction

Outcome

B Corps treat people with dignity and respect their human rights.

Purpose

Companies have the responsibility to respect human rights and they do this by practicing human rights due diligence and remediation. This starts with embedding a sense of ‘responsibility to respect’ within the company’s culture and ways of working. Crucially, the ‘responsibility to respect’ should be strengthened over time as a company implements and learns, so that eventually practicing human rights due diligence becomes second nature, much in the same way food safety or financial due diligence have become mainstream expectations of companies.

Effective due diligence requires that companies know where to focus their efforts, and this means understanding how they may be involved with negative impacts on people's human rights through their operations and value chain. This enables companies to take action to prevent and mitigate negative impacts, starting with the most severe impacts. Where companies cause or contribute to negative impacts, they either directly remediate them or contribute to their remediation. The objective is to achieve improved outcomes for people who are at risk of harm from human rights violations, or suffer actual harm, in connection with the company's operations, products or services.

In the B Corp Standards, companies are expected to pursue positive impacts on people, going beyond only ‘doing no harm’. These are captured under the other social standards topics and Impact Business Models.

Scope

All individuals and communities affected by the company’s own operations and value chain.

Notes

• This requirement inherently overlaps with the Purpose & Stakeholder Governance, Fair Wages, Workplace Culture, and JEDI topics.

• JEDI and human rights have deep conceptual links with one another. Their intentions and eventual goals are the same - that all people are treated with respect and live with dignity. They remain distinct topics in these standards because at the moment they inhabit distinct spaces in sustainability and organizational change discourses. Frameworks, standards, tools and guidance often only concern one of the two. Human rights in the context of business (‘Business & Human Rights’) is usually framed in terms of human rights due diligence, focusing primarily on preventing harm to people. This stems from the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights. JEDI on the other hand, is not explicitly rooted in any such framework and (more explicitly) refers to both the prevention of harm and pursuit of positive impacts. Over time, they are likely to converge. Within these standards, they exist as distinct topics despite their deep conceptual links to recognize that currently they inhabit distinct spaces and in anticipation that distinct topics lead to accelerated progress within each topic.

• Grievance and remediation procedures are covered under PSG3.

• Reporting on human rights is covered under PSG6.1 and PSG6.2.

• HR4 should be implemented alongside ESC5, as procurement and supplier engagement have both social and environmental considerations.

• L'acronyme de cette thématique est DH en français et HR en anglais.

Requirements

The filter below is personalised to you, based on the data shared. Please keep the preselected size and sector filters while sharing feedback.