Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) Process

The Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) grid is part of a wider Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) grid series that helps companies add financial and non-financial value to their proposition. As ESG takes on ever greater resonance amongst investors and the public, the authors of this grid (MSS Global) have drawn on their international expertise in business and human rights assurance to develop a straight-forward, accessible support framework to guide you through this critical area.

What is human rights due diligence (HRDD)?

Human rights are basic rights and freedoms for everyone based on dignity, fairness, equality and respect. An organisation may affect people’s human rights, positively or negatively, through its own activities and through its wider business relationships.

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) focuses on a concern for human rights within the entirety of an enterprise’s operation (HQ, subsidiaries and supply chain). A human rights due diligence (HRDD) process is a comprehensive, logical approach by which enterprises can proactively identify, avoid and prevent adverse impacts on peoples’ human rights, across all of their activities.

Once risks have been identified, a strategy can then be established which prioritises action internally, and across the value chain, and then monitors that action to ensure it continually remains effective.

Human rights due diligence has been a major focus of the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in recent years.

Why is this topic important?

There are a number of emergent governance trends that place increasing emphasis on the human rights due diligence topic for business leaders. For example, mandatory human rights due diligence legislation is on the cards for European Union companies and is, increasingly, becoming an integral component of investment decision making.

What is in this Human Rights Due Diligence process framework?

MSS Global’s Human Rights Due Diligence grid is a framework that draws on international best practice following a plan-do-check-act methodology to guide you through designing and implementing a HRDD approach in your own organization, project and, for larger enterprises, across the entire supply chain.

The toolbox brings human rights due diligence to life and uniquely both captures relevant knowledge resources and facilitates the project management of such an exercise.

From helping you to undertake a human rights impact assessment, to designing and implementing effective management strategies, through to guidance on how best to manage complaints and grievances, the HRDD grid elements together form a cohesive, scalable toolbox.

This HRDD process, in turn, starts to form the core of an overall, effective ESG strategy.

Following a logical, guided process that draws on a rich set of resources, tools and templates, teams can quickly create individual HRDD project instances cloned from this grid “master”. These project instances enable task delegation/scheduling, collaborative working and executive oversight of this critical DD activity.

Who might the human rights due diligence process framework be useful for?

The Human Rights Due Diligence process framework can be used by leaders, business owners, and managers in any organization – regardless of size, scale of operation or complexity. Inherently flexible, it can be employed company-wide, limited to individual projects or applied to specific supplier selection and oversight.

Whether you are a multinational enterprise (MNE) with obligations under transparency reporting regulations, or an SME seeking to be the supplier of choice, the requirement to ‘know and show’ that you respect human rights has never been so valued.

For larger organizations wanting to develop their supplier management strategies, the Human Rights Due Diligence grid provides a simple way to flow down HRDD expectations to suppliers (and provides a constructive resource starting point for such parties).

Contributing directly to non-financial reporting, the HRDD grid also offers tangible evidence of ESG value as increasingly relevant to investment-based decision making.

About MSS Global (grid author)

MSS Global has been operating in the field of Business and Human Rights assurance since the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGPs) by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. Experience includes auditing human rights management across complex, international supply chains, fragile economies, and conflict-affected areas worldwide.