Which Companies are Serious About Human Rights?

We are beginning to know which companies are serious about human rights as the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark issues its first Progress Report one year on from last year’s pilot.

There is evidence that the ranking is motivating change with a...

Why Does the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark Matter?

The Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) aims to measure the human rights performance of the world’s 500 largest publicly listed companies. Nearly three years in the making, the CHRB is in a critical phase of its evolution.

All of the...

How Elephants Can Dance: Unilever’s Human Rights Report Sets a New Benchmark for Business

For a company that started out in the 1880s selling the world’s first branded soap made of the oil from pine kernels, Unilever plc. has come a long way. Today, Unilever has a global reach, and many of us likely use one or more of its products at...

Progress in Corporate Accountability

Last week Human Rights Watch released its 2013 World Report. It includes an essay by Senior Researcher Christopher Albin-Lackey decrying the hard won and widely adopted UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (GPs) as being “woefully...

What do GRI’s latest Guidelines say about Human Rights?

In 2008, the three organizations partnered for the project Human Rights – A Call to Action. Two publications and three years later, the research and activity instigated for the project has fed into an update of GRI’s third generation of...

Checking in on Corporate Human Rights Reporting

At the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) biennial conference last week, one of the sessions was dedicated to “the Future of Human Rights Reporting”. The panelists, drawn from diverse sectors, covered a wide range of issues.

These included the...

Operationalising Human Rights - How Hard are Companies Trying? 

Our commentary on the Trafigura case highlights how a combination of weak governance and business expediency can result in negative impacts on human rights. But what exactly should business do to prevent such situations arising in the first place?