Human Rights Reporting in Southeast Asia
The Current Use of Metrics in Company Human Rights Reporting in Southeast Asia.
A collaboration between the Shift Project, ASEAN CSR Network, and Article 30
A contribution to the Valuing Respect project research stream, to build empirical evidence for how businesses currently track the progress and effectiveness of their efforts to respect human rights.
How do top-listed companies in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand currently assess the effectiveness of their efforts to identify and reduce risks to people’s human rights and to remedy adverse impacts that occur? To assess this, a research team from Article 30 investigated publicly available company material, including, for example, reports, website content, statements, policies or procedures, in search of information relating to human rights performance.
Despite the global emphasis on human rights performance tracking and reporting since the unanimous endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011), only a select cohort of the top 50 market capitalized companies in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand provide information on their human rights performance. Instead, public disclosure continues to focus narrowly on traditional corporate philanthropy, charity, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), technical occupational health and safety (OHS) and environmental concerns remain preeminent. This is one of a number of key findings that came into focus during the study:
Every country features a number of companies that stand apart with their focus on human rights and/or in terms of being thorough and transparent. Notably, these companies appear to share a commonality that they have been or are the subject of significant public scrutiny. Even these companies exhibit significant selectivity in their public disclosure of information on human rights performance.
Reporting, whether human rights specific or relating to other Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues, tends to convey an entirely positive portrayal of companies.
Many companies provide extensive lists of activities giving the impression that the quantity of activities is seen as proof of favorable social performance.
Information on social performance is scattered and often random, making it difficult to identify causal pathways or effectiveness in general. There is no apparent standardization, rigor, or commonality of expectations around what kind of details companies disclose.
The lack of specific data points raises questions about whether companies can effectively strategize to meet their responsibility to respect human rights.
Top-listed companies in Thailand stood apart from those in Malaysia and Singapore in terms of the number of companies that provide details around human rights impact assessments, the results of those impact assessments, their mitigation plans, the effectiveness of those efforts, and the awards that they receive.
Each country exhibited some unique attributes with regards to social performance reporting:
Malaysia: Significant focus on charitable contributions/philanthropic efforts, emphasis on facts and figures around diversity/inclusion and OHS measures, numerous claims citing zero human rights complaints or violations, three companies stand apart with details, transparency, and inclusion of civil society in tracking and reporting.
Singapore: Diversity/inclusion efforts, OHS auditing, training, and supplier conduct management are preeminent datapoints, disclosure orients towards CSR and ESG, promising outliers around handling of grievances and remediation, as well as concise yet comprehensive reporting.
Thailand: Stands apart from Singapore and Malaysia for the prevalence of human rights impact assessments and specific measures and behavioral changes resulting from those assessments, awards stand out as potent measure of social performance, anomalous with prevalence of reporting on sustainability indices inclusion.
DOWNLOAD THE SHIFT PROJECT REPORT
https://shiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Current%20use%20of%20metrics_ASEAN.pdf