A culture change is required to spread the use of specialist due diligence by companies to check for abuses in supply chains, according to a key document setting out aims for the UN’s special working group on business and human rights.

The document forms a roadmap detailing the aims of the working group over the next decade as it campaigns to embed use of the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).

Setting out a list of eight overarching goals, the working group’s UNGPs 10+ plan, marking a decade since the UNGPs were established, places human rights due diligence at the heart of its project.

“To realise lasting change and ingrain business respect for human rights as part of companies ‘DNA’,” writes the working group, “there is a need for a culture change supported by integration of human rights due diligence into governance and organisational frameworks and into the core of the business model.”

The document will be welcomed by campaign groups urging governments around the world to either update or introduce laws for mandatory human rights due diligence. Many observers see the UN’s fresh push for due diligence as the most important part of the roadmap.

Leo Martin, director and founder of advisory firm Good Corporation, says: “The bit of the roadmap that is most important is the due diligence section which is saying, ‘Stop talking about it and start checking and proving that you have actually got relationships with suppliers and partners to prove to yourself that they are operating without incurring any sort of human rights abuse’.”

Human rights in global supply chains

Not everyone sees the emphasis on due diligence in the same way. According to John Morrison, chief executive of the Institute for Human Rights and Business, it was never the intention of John Ruggie, architect of the UNGPs, that due diligence should be become their “centre of gravity”. Morrison’s concern is that due diligence has created an “industry of consultants and box ticking compliance measures.”

“We also know that ‘vanilla’ human rights due diligence has it limitations,” says Morrison, hence work on “enhanced due diligence” in conflict zones. He adds there is a risk that conclusions reached via due diligence for business impacts “might not reach the same conclusions as a wider assessment of societal human rights impacts”.

While there may be concerns, some observers believe business has made strides over recent years with many using models such as the French Law of Vigilance as a way of handling their relationship with potential human rights risk in their supply chains.

Governments have been keen in recent years to push the introduction of due diligence. The European Union has been wrestling with the terms of a new law, the Sustainable Corporate Governance Directive, that would make human rights due diligence mandatory across member states. However, the directive is yet to be fully signed off.

In the UK, a campaign is underway for the introduction of mandatory due diligence to update the Modern Slavery Act. A group of 36 companies, including John Lewis, Primark and Tesco, recently signed an open letter arguing that the pandemic has revealed the “fragility” of global supply chains and the vulnerabilities they create for workers, communities and indigenous peoples. They argue that while the Modern Slavery Act may have once been cutting edge advances elsewhere have since made the UK look like a “laggard”.

At the time, Thulsi Narayanasamy, of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, told Board Agenda: “The UK must consider introducing mandatory laws that hold corporations accountable for conducting human rights due diligence across their supply chain, including paying a living wage.

“Voluntary measures have failed to provide the most vulnerable workers with a protection of their rights so introducing binding laws that hold companies to account for due diligence failures would be the first step towards ensuring that everyone has their basic rights respected and protected at work.”

Mandatory due diligence

Disappointment with voluntary due diligence measures is where many recent not-for-profit campaigns have focused their concern. And part of the UN roadmap attempts to confront uptake of good due diligence practice with an explicit commitment to “scale up” adoption of human rights principles into business “processes and practices”. How the working group will achieve that is left unclear, though one route may be to persuade governments to introduce manadator their.

The working group recognises there may be obstacles along the way. National laws may conflict with human rights rights principles; business relationships in some locations may be based on corruption, especially in “conflict-affected areas”.

But a number of countries have already are working on due diligence measures. France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway already has them. Japan is expected to reference human rights in a new corporate governance code.

The roadmap may seem an esoteric document to many company directors. It serves up strategic intent rather than a list of action points for discussion at the next board gathering. John Morrison says an opportunity may have been missed for the roadmap to elaborate on the identity “affected stakeholders” as a useful tool for board “prioritisation”.

However, it does emphasise the importance of stakeholders and, warns Morrison, it would be a mistake to ignore the document. “There is nothing in the roadmap itself to directly compel boards to pay attention but they would be foolish to overlook the wider implications of societal expectation, of which the UNGPs are a part.”