The Guiding Principles are the first global standard for conveying and impeding the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity. The principles continue to provide the internationally accepted framework for enhancing standards and practice regarding business and human rights.

The principles are grounded in recognition of states’ existing obligations: respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights and fundamental freedoms. Business enterprises are also required to comply with applicable laws and communicate how they address their human rights impacts.

The importance of these principles also lies within the state’s ability to ensure that their own business operations are fulfilling their obligations, specifically maintaining adequate domestic policy space when pursuing business-related policy objectives with other states or business enterprises. States should also encourage institutions to promote business respect for human rights to help meet their duty to protect against human rights abuse by business enterprises.

In meeting their duty to protect, states should provide effective guidance to business enterprises on how to respect human rights throughout their operations. State regulation and policy should not constrain but play an enabling function for businesses to respect human rights. Communication by business enterprises on how they address their human rights impacts can range from informal engagement with affected stakeholders to formal public reporting. This type of communication between stakeholders and states is essential, so that respect for human rights can be properly governed.

The responsibility to respect human rights requires that business enterprises have policies and processes through which they can both know and show that they respect human rights in practice, including:

• A policy commitment to meet their responsibility to respect human rights;
• A human rights due diligence process to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address their impacts on human rights;
• Processes to enable the remediation of any adverse human rights impacts they cause or to which they contribute.

In order to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address their adverse human rights impacts, business enterprises should carry out human rights due diligence. The process should include assessing actual and potential human rights impacts, integrating and acting upon the findings, tracking responses, and communicating how impacts are addressed. To effectively understand human rights risk business should involve meaningful consultation with potentially affected groups and other relevant stakeholders. Business enterprises are also expected to treat the risk of causing or contributing to gross human rights abuses as a legal compliance issue wherever they operate.

In order to ensure their effectiveness, non-judicial grievance mechanisms, both State-based and non-State-based, must follow a set of criteria. The criteria include legitimacy, accessibility, predictability, equitability, transparency, the ability to be rights compatible as well as able to show a source of continuous learning. These criteria provide a benchmark for designing, revising or assessing a non-judicial grievance mechanism to help ensure that it is effective in practice. Poorly designed or implemented grievance mechanisms can risk compounding a sense of grievance amongst affected stakeholders by heightening their sense of disempowerment and disrespect by the process.

1. The UNGPs encompasses three pillars outlining how businesses and states should apply the framework to their own projects. Each pillar is subsequently broken down into both its foundational and operational principles, with the pillars themselves being the states' duty to protect human rights; the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and access to remedy.
2. In order to verify whether adverse human rights impacts are being addressed, business enterprises should track the effectiveness of their response, based on qualitative/quantitative factors and feedback from internal and external sources.
3. The UNGPs should be implemented in a non-discriminatory manner, with attention to the rights, needs, and challenges faced by individuals from groups or populations that may be at heightened risk of becoming vulnerable.
4. Human rights due diligence should be initiated as early as possible in the development of a new activity or relationship, given that human rights risks can be increased or mitigated already at the stage of structuring contracts or other agreements, and may be inherited through mergers or acquisitions.
5. Assessments of human rights impacts should be undertaken at regular intervals. These intervals include prior to a new activity or relationship; prior to major decisions or changes in the operation (e.g. market entry, product launch, policy change); in response to or anticipation of changes in the operating environment (e.g. rising social tensions); and periodically throughout the life of an activity or relationship.
6. Meaningful consultation between potentially affected groups and other relevant stakeholders should be employed to gauge human rights risks. The consultation should seek to identify and assess any actual or potential adverse human rights impacts with which they may be involved, either through their own activities or as a result of their business relationships.
7. In regard to the responsibility to protect human rights, policies and processes should be put in place that accurately reflect the size and circumstance of business enterprises. A policy commitment to meeting the responsibility to respect human rights and a due diligence process to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address their impacts on human rights should also be included.
8. In order to prevent and mitigate adverse human rights impacts, business enterprises should integrate the findings from their impact assessments across relevant internal functions and processes to take appropriate action. For integration to be successful, the responsibility for addressing the impacts should be assigned to the most appropriate level and function within the business enterprise, with the most effective forms of integration including the internal decision-making process, budget allocations and oversight processes.