Firms urged to strengthen their rights reporting

Three organizations with links to the United Nations are making efforts to encourage more in-depth coverage of human rights in sustainability reports.

The project, Human Rights: A Call to Action, has been set up by the Ethical Globalization Initiative, the Global Reporting Initiative and the United Nations Global Compact.

They say ‘significant progress’ on human rights has been made by many companies but there is still limited understanding of how to disclose policies and programmes publicly.

The three bodies have assembled a working group drawn from the worlds of finance, business and civil society to assess current practice in human rights reporting and recommend improvements.

This may lead to new guidance material for reporting companies and to changes in the guidelines issued by the Global Reporting Initiative.

For the time being, companies are being asked to commit themselves to improving at least one aspect of their human rights reporting over the next year.