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.
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents