Country snapshots: third party research using our Corporate Human Rights Benchmark Methodology

Over the course of 2022–2023, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and the Danish Institute for Human Rights assessed 31 companies with operations in Kenya using our Corporate Human Rights Benchmark Core UNGP Indicators. The companies were selected based on the size of their operations in Kenya and being publicly listed on securities exchange agency in Kenya or elsewhere in the case of transnational companies.

The assessment focused on companies in the agriculture, extractives, energy, communication and commercial services and manufacturing sectors. Some state-owned companies were also included. Companies were given an opportunity to comment on their draft assessment results prior to consolidation.

The study was published in early 2024. Results showed that whilst a few companies are clearly more advanced in conducting and communicating about human rights due diligence, most of the assessed companies (23 out of 31) scored 30 percent and below and only one company scored above 70 percent.

The study included a recommendation to the Kenyan Government to bolster its efforts on its primary obligation to protect against human rights abuses in line with the expectation of the UNGPs and the Kenya National Action Plan (NAP) on Business and Human Rights.

In March 2024, the Colombian Ombudsman (Defensoria del Pueblo de Colombia) and the Danish Institute for Human Rights published the first assessment of Colombian businesses and human rights, assessing 24 companies across key economic sectors for the country such as agriculture, trade, construction, manufacturing, mining, services and financial institutions.

Overall results showed that while 42% of companies had a commitment to respecting human rights, only 16% of them integrated this commitment and conducted due diligence, and only 19% had grievance mechanisms and remediation processes in line with the UNGPs.

In January 2023, the Programme for Corporate Sustainability of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PSC UC), supported by the International Labour Organization through the Responsible Business Conduct Programme in Latin America and the Caribbean, published the first snapshot study of Chilean companies using our first Corporate Human Rights Benchmark Core UNGP Indicators. The study looked at the policies and practices of 29 companies publicly listed on the Indice de Precio Selectivo de Acciones Chilean stock market index from different industries.  It was the first assessment of its kind in Latin America.

The assessment aimed to understand the level of implementation of the UN Guiding Principles in the country. It also sought to understand the impacts of new regulation put in place by Chile’s Financial Market Commission requiring publicly listed companies to report how they integrate sustainability and human rights approaches in their operations in their annual reports. The study found that while a handful of companies are fairly advanced in meeting the expectations of the UN Guiding Principles the majority still have a long way to go.

In January of 2024, Programme for Corporate Sustainability of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile published the second iteration of their snapshot of Chilean companies. In addition to the 29 publicly listed companies assessed in 2023, the study also included 15 state-owned companies.

The average scores of the publicly listed companies showed a slight improvement on the prior year. Some companies made big strides towards implementing the fundamental elements of the UNGPs and improving by over six points in just one year. State-owned companies, on the other hand, scored quite low in the assessment, with an average score of 3.4 out of 24, revealing that UNGP implementation is in a very nascent stage for these institutions.

Human Asia’s Business and Human Rights Center selected 12 major Korean companies and assessed them using our Core UNGP Indicators. Ten were private enterprises, consisting of subsidiaries of the top ten conglomerates or the top ten companies ranked by revenue in 2022.

Out of the 12 companies assessed, three scored above 50%, with one company scoring 18.5 out of24. Eight out of 12 companies assessed scored 12 points or lower, falling below the 50% mark. These results indicated that a considerable number of companies are yet to establish comprehensive human rights-friendly management systems and policies, including the implementation of human rights due diligence processes.

The study also found that companies that embedded respect for human rights into their culture and management systems demonstrated strong overall performance. HumanAsia also noted that companies that had been previously assessed in WBA’s Corporate Human Rights Benchmark improved their scores, and that this suggests that the benchmark can have a direct or indirect impact on the progress of human rights policies and practices in global supply chains.

In 2019, the University of Dublin (Trinity Business School – Centre for Social Innovation) conducted a pilot assessment using our Core UNGP methodology, which they repeated in 2020. Because of its political footprint, as well as its role as a supportive base for many multinationals, Ireland presents an important context in which to examine business and human rights (BHR).

The reports analysed public information from the top 50 publicly listed firms operating in Ireland (20 of whom are domiciled in Ireland, alongside 30 multinational employers) and also included a standalone analysis of the ten largest state owned enterprises. The aim was to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the state of corporate adherence to the UNGPs in Ireland. It found that business certainly had room for improvement, with human rights due diligence a key area of weakness. The report made several recommendations, including policy and legislative options for the Irish government to consider.

Over the course of 2023, the University of Dublin (Trinity Business School – Centre for Social Innovation) re-assessed the companies that they assessed in 2020 to understand what, if anything, had changed in the intervening period.
Similarly to the previous iteration, the 2024 report analysed public information from the top 50 publicly listed firms operating in Ireland (21 of whom are domiciled in Ireland, alongside 29 multinational employers) and also included a standalone analysis of the eleven largest state-owned enterprises.

The aim was to understand the current state of adoption of the UNGPs in this new, regulation-based era for business and human rights in Europe. The findings present a mixed picture. Companies benchmarked for a second time showed limited improvement across comparable indicators. Human rights due diligence, stakeholder engagement and access to remedy were highlighted as key areas of weakness. The report made several recommendations, including policy and legislative options for the Irish government to consider.

In 2021, non-profit organisation Ecología y Desarrollo (ECODES) conducted a study to determine the level of integration of business and human rights international frameworks among Spain’s largest publically traded companies, in line with the upcoming European Directive on Due diligence on Environment and Human Rights.

The study used our Core UNGP Indicators to assess companies included in the 2002 IBEX35 index – a corporate benchmark index of the Spanish market, which is considered to be representative of the most relevant sectors and includes a combination of companies that are either transnational or have a significant presence in Spain.

The result is a snapshot of the current status of Spain’s leading companies in relation to their due diligence activities, and a first analysis of companies’ reporting behavior in relation to internationally recognised frameworks in the field of human rights. The study is currently available in Spanish; an English version will be published later in the year.

In December 2022, Ecodes published its second snapshot, assessing 40 Spanish companies (all IBEX 35 companies, plus five additional keystone companies). The results show that most companies do fulfill the most basic requirements, but fail to communicate how they implement their commitment to respect human rights appropriately, including conducting effective stakeholder engagement as part of their due diligence processes, and ensuring the access of rightsholders to grievance mechanisms

In December 2023, the non-profit organisation Ecodes published a third iteration, this time assessing 44 companies operating in Spain, including all IBEX 35 companies. Ecodes identified an overall slight improvement in performance in all areas and indicators since the first 2022 iteration, rather than an improvement in any one area. The study also identified that on average, Spanish companies scored below the average score of European companies included in the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark. Human rights due diligence and grievance mechanisms were areas in which companies need to improve the most. In addition, Ecodes found that the companies assessed in both 2022 and 2023 improved their scores by 14.5%.

In February 2023, the non-profit organisation Action Solidarité Tiers Monde published a study using our Core UNGP Indicators, assessing 27 state-owned enterprises. The study assessed ten privately owned companies and 17 companies in which the Luxembourg State is the majority or  largest shareholder.  The sectors assessed included financial institutions, logistics, ICT, service and construction.

Of the 27 companies assessed, 18 scored zero points because they did not publish any documents related to their human rights. Human rights due diligence and grievance mechanisms were identified as an area in which companies need to improve most.

The report made several recommendations, including policy and legislative options for the Luxembourg government to consider.

In September 2020, the Danish Institute for Human Rights used the Core UNGP indicators to provide an analysis of the human rights policies and due diligence practices of the 20 largest companies in Denmark. The companies operate in a variety of different sectors and all have global operations, value and supply chains.

The purpose of the snapshot was to contribute to the ongoing debate on how businesses can scale up respect for human rights. A key aspect of these conversations relates to the proposed introduction of mandatory human rights due diligence legislation at the European Union level, as well as the international binding treaty negotiation process at the UN level. An overall finding was that company performance was weakest across the human rights due diligence indicators when compared to the area of policy commitments.

In October 2022, the Institute published a second snapshot, this time assessing 30 Danish companies’ documentation of their human rights efforts, using WBA’s revised CHRB methodology. The average score of companies was 36%, with nearly two-thirds of companies scoring under 50% and over one-third of companies scoring below 30%. In particular, companies struggled with informing whether they provide follow-up, compensation, and redress if their activities are associated with adverse impacts on human rights. The report included recommendations for companies as well as the Danish government, investors and civil society.

In June 2022, the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research at the University of St Andrews published an assessment of the human rights policies, processes, and practices of fifteen leading Scottish companies using our Core CUNGP Indicators. The majority of companies evaluated as part of this assessment scored zero across all indicators related to the process of human rights due diligence.

The report draws attention to the urgent need for Scottish companies to make human rights a priority and to more comprehensively implement the UN Guiding Principles in order to develop human rights capacity and governance mechanisms. The report also recommends that the Scottish Government identify and address regulatory and policy gaps, and provide effective guidance to business.

In 2020, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a call for proposals to assess how Finnish companies were fulfilling their human rights responsibilities as outlined by the UNGPs. Information produced by the assessment would support the implementation of elements of the Government’s Programme related to corporate social responsibility. The outcome was a 2021 report, the ‘Status of Human Rights Performance of Finnish Companies’.

The project assessed 78 Finnish companies from the TE500 list – a list of the 500 companies with the largest revenue in Finland – 29 companies using CHRB’s full methodology, and 49 companies were assessed using the Core UNGP Indicators. It found that although Finnish companies are, at least on a general level, quite widely committed to respecting human rights, the practical integration of human rights responsibility and related monitoring into the core activities of companies, is still largely at an early stage.

The report also noted that “the Core UNGP Indicators developed by CHRB would be well suited for regular monitoring of the human rights performance of Finnish companies, as the indicators can be widely used to assess companies of different sizes and from different industries and they focus on the key aspects of the UN Guiding Principles.”

In April 2021, the Belgian Federal Institute for Sustainable Development (FIDO/IFDD) published a National Baseline Assessment (NBA) on Business and Human Rights in Belgium. The report is a stocktake of the progress made by Belgium authorities and companies since the launch of Belgium’s first National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights back in 2017. The research for the baseline assessment was conducted by HIVA-KU Leuven, and the Law and Development Research Group (University of Antwerp).

The report includes a screening of thirty Belgian companies using our Core UNGP Indicator Assessment. For six of the thirty companies, particular attention was paid to how they deal with their responsibilities in conflict-affected and high-risk areas (CAHRAs). The report found that while a growing number of companies are formally committed to respecting human rights, none of the companies assessed had translated those commitments into effective human rights due diligence processes and few that are sourcing from CAHRAs have specific policies on how to deal with human rights risks in these areas.

In November 2019, the ZHAW School of Management and Law & the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre published a study based on our UNGP Core Indicators, examining how the 20 largest German companies by turnover report and communicate to the public regarding their responsibilities to respect human rights. It found that none of the companies achieved at least one point on every indicator – showing that none of Germany’s largest companies could demonstrate that they meet the fundamental expectations of the UNGPs.

These findings foreshadowed the results of the German National Action Plan (NAP) monitoring, where the government committed to introducing legislation to regulate corporate due diligence in supply chains if less than 50% of companies with 500+ employees did not meet the voluntary NAP requirements by 2020. Based on the poor results of the NAP monitoring, in 2021 the German Parliament passed the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, requiring large companies to regularly and systematically identify and address human rights and environmental risks in their supply chains.

In October 2017, the Australian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) and the Centre for Australian Ethical Research (CAER) conducted a snapshot of Australian companies’ responses to human rights risks. Their report was based on a set of our indicators that were similar to the Core UNGP Indicators. (The Core UNGP Indicators hadn’t been developed yet).

ACCR and CAER’s aim was to deepen investors’ understanding of human rights issues for Australian companies, and increase their appetite for positive stewardship through results-driven engagements with companies on human rights.

The report assessed 23 Australian Stock Exchange listed companies on their management of human rights related risks in their activities and business relationships. The companies were from the agricultural, extractives and medical supplies sectors. The report demonstrated, with a few exceptions, a low level of understanding of human rights risks and engagement with leading practices on risk management across the companies surveyed.