Realizing Rights has built up strong partnerships and an increasingly solid reputation in the area of business and human rights. We have played a catalytic and supportive role in the development of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights, influenced the work of the UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights and catalyzed new action in the UN Global Compact among others.
Our cross-cutting approach to corporate responsibility involves:
- supporting the UN Global Compact to encourage promotion of human rights among Global Compact member companies through its Human Rights Working Group and a new joint project with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to enhance human rights reporting by companies;
- helping to ensure a positive outcome from the mandate of the UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights;
- fostering the leadership of strategic private sector actors, including those based in Africa, in promoting human rights;
- linked to our decent work program, engaging with African countries to analyze and communicate about the impact of businesses on economic and social rights in Africa.
By 2010, we anticipate that our corporate responsibility work will have:
- Made identifiable improvements in human rights policy and action for major corporations as well as influenced participating companies reporting on these within the UN Global Compact and GRI.
- Helped shape international consensus on the human rights responsibilities of business including through the development of guidelines against which corporations can be held accountable for their human rights- related impacts and actions at regional, national and international levels.
- Fostered the development of new centers of expertise on business and human rights issues.
The Global Reporting Initiative, the United Nations Global Compact, and Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative – three leading organizations working to integrate concern for human rights issues into mainstream business practices – have joined together with the objective of significantly improving understanding of how and why to report on human rights performance and to embed this better understanding in global reporting standards.
On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights during 2008, Realizing Rights and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre are joining together to encourage more companies to adopt human rights policies. Over the coming months, Mary Robinson will be writing to the CEOs of major companies asking whether their firms have a human rights policy statement and encouraging them to adopt one if they do not. Company human rights policy statements will be added to the running list on the Resource Centre.
Institute for Human Rights and Business
The Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) is dedicated to being a global centre of excellence and expertise on the relationship between business and internationally proclaimed human rights standards.
It works to raise corporate standards and strengthen public policy to ensure that the activities of companies do not contribute to human rights abuses, and in fact lead to positive outcomes.
June 25th 2010
"Human Rights are good business" - United Nations Global Compact Summit
From 24-25 June, representatives of more than 1,000 companies gathered in New York to assess their progress under the United Nations Global Compact, the world's largest corporate citizenship initiative. "A decade ago, few companies saw rights as relevant to their operations", writes Mary Robinson, one of the featured attendees at the summit, "but it's now clear that good ethics profit everyone."
December 10th 2009
Human Rights Day 2009: New call for companies from key markets to adopt human rights policies
As the world marked International Human Rights Day on 10 December, major companies are being urged to make public commitments to respect human rights. Over 240 companies worldwide now have a policy statement on their commitment to human rights, among them Anglo American, Cerrejón, Codelco, GE, HSBC, Mitsubishi, Nokia and Statoil.
