Chapter 04 · People & supply chainsHuman Rights & Social Sustainability
Business and human rights
Definition
The field of policy, law and practice addressing business impacts on human rights, anchored in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) — 31 principles implementing the "Protect, Respect and Remedy" framework developed by Special Representative John Ruggie and unanimously endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. The UNGPs rest on three pillars: the state duty to protect against human-rights abuses by third parties, including business; the corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and the need for access to effective remedy.
References
UNGPs as 31 principles on Protect, Respect and Remedy; Human Rights Council endorsement; Ruggie authorship; pillar definitions; "first global standard" characterisation.
Overview
What it means
The UNGPs established the authoritative global standard — the first the UN itself calls the global standard for the field. For companies, the operative pillar is "respect": avoid infringing rights, address adverse impacts, and conduct human-rights due diligence across operations and value chains proportional to severity and leverage.
This framework now underpins mandatory due-diligence laws (France, Germany, the EU's CSDDD), modern-slavery disclosure regimes, and OECD-aligned responsible-business-conduct standards.
How it is used
Companies embed the UNGPs through policy commitments, due-diligence processes, grievance mechanisms and remediation; investors benchmark alignment; litigation and regulation increasingly harden the soft-law standard into binding duties.
Why it matters
Business and human rights is the normative backbone of supply-chain sustainability: virtually every due-diligence law, disclosure rule and corporate accountability mechanism in this dictionary descends from the UNGPs.