The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) provide a globally recognised framework for how businesses should meet their responsibility to respect fundamental human rights.

The UNGPs are built on three pillars:

1. The State Duty to Protect Human Rights
   Governments must prevent, investigate, punish and redress human rights abuses by third parties, including businesses.
2. The Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights
   Companies must avoid infringing on the rights of others and address adverse impacts they’re involved in — directly or indirectly.
3. Access to Remedy
   When abuses occur, both states and businesses must ensure that affected people can access effective remedy.

The focus for businesses lies in the second pillar — the responsibility to respect. This means:

• Avoiding causing or contributing to negative human rights impacts.
• Preventing or mitigating impacts directly linked to operations, products or services through business relationships — even where the company itself hasn’t caused them.
• Implementing human rights due diligence processes to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for how they address human rights impacts.
• Enabling remedy where they have caused or contributed to harm.

At the heart of the UNGPs lies a simple yet powerful message: All companies, regardless of size, sector, or geography, have a responsibility to respect human rights.

Read more:

• The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs)
• Landing page for the UNGPs, including summary, videos, and other materials
• UN’s interpretive guide on the corporate responsibility to respect human rights
• The Global Compact Self Assessment Tool that assess company performance across four issue areas, inspire continuous improvement, and assist in the development of a Communication on Progress.

The UNGPs Are the Floor, Not the Ceiling

The UNGPs are fundamentally about do no harm. But just “not doing harm” is no longer enough in today’s social, political, and environmental landscape. While the UNGPs fulfil the purpose of defining the responsibility between state and business, when implement in practice, it too often becomes a purely risk management and compliance exercise.

Examples are:

• Policies exist but aren’t meaningfully integrated into decision-making.
• Due diligence is treated as a tick-box exercise rather than an ongoing, adaptive process.
• Human rights are siloed under ESG, legal, or CSR functions that are far from core business strategy or operational planning.

In this setup, human rights remain on the margins — treated as a reputational or legal risk, not as a strategic lens and driver of innovation.

Human rights as a strategic lens and driver for innovation

To move beyond compliance and make human rights strategically relevant, companies need to rethink how human rights interact with how they create value, grow, and operate. There is no one-fits-all model or concrete answers for this – yet at least. In the meantime, here are a few reflective question to guide the shift from compliance to strategy and operations:

1. Human rights as a strategic lens: Make humans rights part of strategic planning, M&A, and investment decisions instead of an afterthought.

• How does our business model intersect with human rights risks and opportunities?
• Are there segments of our workforce or value chain where our core activities depend on fragile rights contexts (e.g. gig workers, outsourced labor, land use)?
• Are our growth plans entering markets or sectors with elevated human rights risks?

2. Human rights a driver of innovation: Human rights can be an opportunity to see things from a new perspectives driving innovation. :

• Where can we create new offerings that actively enable rights (e.g. financial inclusion, health access, education)?
• Can we shift from extractive to regenerative business models in supply chains?
• How might better human rights outcomes also improve performance — through loyalty, brand equity, talent retention?

Considering human rights in strategy and innovation processes opens up competitive advantage and goes beyond just risk avoidance.

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Stay tuned!

This blog is about how to move from the foundational principles of the UNGPs to a strategic, operational, and transformative approach to human rights. We are all on the same journey on building a better future, I and hope to gather all latest news and developments that take human rights into business operations.

The upcoming posts will explore:

• Case studies of how companies have integrated human rights into commercial strategy and operations
• Practical tools and frameworks for integrating human rights into strategy and operations