2020 UN Forum on Business and Human Rights

A RECORDING OF THIS SESSION IS AVAILABLE HERE.

Slides from CHRB, S&P and WBCSD presentations available here.


About this session:

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the UN Working Group on Business & Human Rights has launched its UNGPs 10+ / Next Decade BHR project to chart a course for a decade of action on business and human rights. It will take stock of the first ten years, and then, most importantly, develop an ambitious vision and roadmap for implementing the UNGPs more broadly between now and 2030. In this context, and as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to highlight the urgency of ensuring corporate respect for human rights throughout value chains, the availability of reliable data is crucial.

The Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB), which is part of the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) is an essential tool in providing this data. It is the only public benchmark of corporate human rights performance, assessing over 200 of the largest global publicly traded companies from high-risk sectors using a methodology that is grounded in the UNGPs. This year’s benchmark results, which will be unveiled during this session and are the fourth iteration of the CHRB, will allow us to look at company performance across topics and sectors, but also give insight into progress over the last four years.

This session will provide an opportunity to also look at the broader landscape of data available on UNGP implementation, in order to identify opportunities and challenges in UNGP implementation, with a view to inform priorities for the next decade of the business and human rights agenda.

Objective
This 90-minute event will convene key stakeholders from government, business, finance and civil society to identify what the available data tells us about where we are in terms of UNGPs uptake among business, and key gaps in data that must be addressed in order to achieve meaningful progress in the next decade. We will focus on two questions:

• What does the data tell us? Using CHRB’s 2020 findings and including the perspective of other reporting initiatives and standard bodies - as well as an industry platform - we will explore what the data currently tells us on business and human rights.
• What does the data miss? Convening perspectives from the investor community, civil society and experts, we will dive into how the data is being used and how we can address the challenges of capturing meaningful data going forward.  

It is our aim that the latest CHRB data and interventions from a range of stakeholders will provide not only a rich and insightful discussion to the proposed questions, but one grounded in concrete findings and evidence, so that we can continue to learn, align and take forward what is needed in order to accelerate business implementation of the UNGPs.