The Tech Sector and National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights

This thematic supplement should be read in conjunction with ’National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights: A Toolkit for the Development, Implementation, and Review of State Commitments to Business and Human Rights Frameworks’.

The human rights impacts – both positive and negative—of digital technologies have been on the public agenda for almost two decades, with increasing attention to the activities of big tech companies.

Tech companies can play a positive role in enabling the exercise of human rights, by—for example—enabling remote access to education and health services. However, they can also pose risks to them, through blocking access to information, allowing the proliferation of hate speech and other forms of harmful content, privacy breaches and the development of artificial intelligence solutions with discriminatory biases. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights articulate the obligations of States to protect human rights and the responsibilities of businesses to respect human rights. This duty to protect applies to all business entities, including tech companies. States thus have an obligation to implement regulatory and legislative measures to ensure tech companies respect human rights.

This guidance document has been developed as a tool to assist state actors and other stakeholders involved in the development of NAPs and aims to provide advice on the integration of tech sector-related risks. While all human rights can be impacted by the digital technologies developed by tech companies, this thematic supplement focuses on three of the rights most affected: the rights to privacy, freedom of expression and equality/non-discrimination.

The guidance document includes:

• An analysis of the relationship between technology and human rights with a focus on the tech sector’s impacts on the rights to freedom of expression, privacy and non-discrimination, and the key relevant regulatory and policy trends in these areas;
• Advice on how to include tech sector related consideration in the NAP process with regard to stakeholder mapping and engagement and the identification of groups at risk;
• A “national baseline assessment” tool with guiding questions aimed at identifying legal and policy human rights gaps, as well as tech sector-related human rights impacts that could be addressed and prioritized in a NAP.