25 lowers expectations and incentives for its achievement among personnel and business partners. Moreover, the responsibility to respect human rights exists regardless of the enterprise’s own commitment: it is not the commitment to meet it that creates the responsibility. An enterprise is well advised to be transparent about the efforts it makes to manage the transition as it develops or adjusts the policies and processes it needs. It could, for example, provide public information on the timelines it has set for various stages of implementation. It could engage a group of independent experts—respected individuals from civil society, national human rights institutions, academia or other fields—to advise it on the development of these new processes or oversee its own efforts to do so. If it uses a stakeholder or expert panel of this kind, some independent reporting from the panel can provide important transparency and credibility to the ongoing efforts. In short, if an enterprise is able to demonstrate that it has serious processes under way to put its policy commitment into practice, this can help create the space it needs to develop the internal policies, procedures and practices to deliver on that commitment. Indeed, if an enterprise’s human rights challenges are changing over time and require adjustments to the systems that address them, approaches of this kind may be of ongoing benefit.

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