Human Rights & Social Impact

Companies and investors face growing expectations to show how they identify and address their human rights impacts. The regulatory landscape and reporting requirements on modern slavery and human rights and environmental due diligence, among others, are continuously evolving. Meanwhile, civil society and consumers increasingly scrutinise companies’ reporting on positive social impacts.

Drawing on our backgrounds in human rights law and compliance, we work closely with leading companies and investors to design and implement tailored human rights policies and strategies aligned with leading international frameworks.

We work continuously with clients to help them implement their social impact and human rights strategy and stay in front of emerging risks in their operations and value chains.

Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGPs), companies are obliged to “know and show” how they address human rights impacts, to ensure transparency and accountability to stakeholders. Many organisations are also subject to evolving regulatory requirements for companies to report on how they conduct human rights due diligence.

Our Human Rights practice assembles industry-leading multilingual project teams to conduct on-the-ground field research for investors and companies on their human rights impacts. Stakeholder engagement is at the heart of our approach, combining meaningful consultation with workers, communities and other affected rightsholders with commentary from local and regional experts, and in-depth public domain research.

Regulators, investors, and stakeholders want more than activity reporting. We build social performance measurement systems that connect policies to outcomes through Theory of Change, KPIs, monitoring and evaluation, and credible reporting.

The result is a practical impact management approach that supports internal decision making, programme improvement, and external assurance.

We support organisations to integrate a just transition in their decarbonisation journey. We do this by helping to prioritise stakeholders that are most affected by the transition to a low-carbon economy, create decent work opportunities, identify opportunities for public-private collaboration, and leave no one behind.

We can help integrate a just transition into our clients’ sustainability commitments, policies, and practices, bridging the various agendas that exist at the nexus of environmental sustainability and social justice and impact.

Regulations increasingly mandate supply chain due diligence, with increased scrutiny on human rights risks beyond first tier suppliers. We help clients proactively manage potential and actual adverse human rights impacts throughout their supply chain and develop approaches to engage with high-risk suppliers globally.

Our approach ensures that a business has a due diligence policy and practices based on international best practices and guiding principles (OECD, UNGPs), and implements these in their supply chains. We then enable businesses to understand how they will enact and embed the diligence.

Leading investors now assess human rights risks as potential value destroyers and as drivers of stewardship priorities. We leverage our experience in assessing human rights risks for corporates and our regional expertise to help investors screen portfolios for their highest risk assets. We also help investors get ahead of human rights issues pre-transaction including in the supply chain, spotlighting high risk sectors and regions and providing tailored analysis on critical issues.

We bring a human rights lens to environmental & social due diligence, analysing risks based on gold standard frameworks such as the IFC Performance Standards as well as the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGPs).