A collaborative approach to Human Rights Impact Assessments
This paper by the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, the Danish Institute for Human Rights and the Sciences Po Law School Clinic, suggests a new collaborative and participatory approach to human rights impact assessments (HRIAs). It is written for stakeholders - in particular, communities, workers, and other project-affected people; their representatives, including local and international civil society organizations; companies; and others - who seek more effective strategies for investigating the human rights impacts of business projects or operations, and who are willing to consider a collaborative assessment. For this audience, the paper provides a set of considerations relevant to such an undertaking.
The paper may also be of interest to representatives of companies, project-affected people, or civil society organizations who are not yet ready to undertake a fully collaborative assessment, but who wish to make their human rights impact assessments more inclusive and responsive, or who seek to encourage greater buy-in from other stakeholders. Such readers might be particularly interested in, for example, the sections on stakeholder involvement and meaningful participation (pp 28-36), the steering committee (pp 38-42), or transparency and disclosure (pp 72-74).
VIDEO in English: This short video features interviews with stakeholders working on HRIAs regarding the challenges of current HRIA practices and the potential benefits of a collaborative approach to HRIAs.
We asked a company representative and practitioners with experience conducting community-led, and company-led, HRIAs about how a collaborative approach might help address some of the problems found in current HRIA practices.
Interviewees: Hervé Deguin (Michelin); Susan Joyce (On Common Ground); Dhanis Rhukan (The Carter Center, DRC)
VIDEO in French: Nous avons demandé à un représentant d’entreprise et à des praticiens ayant mené des études d’impacts sur les droits de l’homme unilatérales comment une telle approche collaborative pourrait aider à résoudre certains problèmes rencontrés par les pratiques actuelles d’études d’impact sur les droits de l’homme.
Personnes interrogées: Hervé Deguin (Michelin); Susan Joyce (On Common Ground); Dhanis Rhukan (The Carter Center, RDC)
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