Effective Human Rights Due Diligence

Rightsholder consultation as the gateway to human rights outcomes

Decades of human rights practice have given the blueprint for how to achieve human rights outcomes. It begins and ends with rightsholder consultation. Rightsholder consultation is the bedrock of a human rights-based approach because results happen through rightsholders rather than to them.

From the earliest stage, rightsholder consultation enables affected individuals to guide the trajectory of HRDD. The best and only way to properly understand corporate human rights risks is to understand the qualitative perspectives of rightsholders who experience them. Issues may surface that would otherwise go unseen or under-estimated. After properly diagnosing risks, the task becomes managing them. Do efforts build upon and support the self-protection strategies that these rightsholders employ? Rightsholder consultation ensures that responses are fit to context and provide individuals with the type of support they need, that will actually mitigate and prevent harm, and produce positive human rights outcomes. If rightsholders are treated as bystanders, what begins as a genuine attempt to manage human rights risks and impact can actually leave rightsholders dislocated and further marginalized.

When done properly, rightsholder consultation changes the game from corporate checklists and faceless risks to qualitative rightsholder experiences and real-world human relations. There is no cookie-cutter way of accomplishing this. Things have to be tailored to circumstances, which only rightsholders fully understand. Through their lived experiences, they have the insights into how to effectively close accountability gaps and confront threats. At every stage of HRDD, rightsholder consultation is the difference between entrenching or closing the gap between corporate prerogatives and the agency of rightsholders. Rightsholder consultation is a metric that can tell stakeholders a lot about whether a business enterprise is serious about managing their impact on human rights.

Read the full article @ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/blog/why-rightsholder-consultation-is-the-gateway-to-effective-human-rights-due-diligence/