Reporting is an essential instrument for organizations to understand the impacts of their decisions and operations on people and the planet. Addressing the most serious corporate impacts on sustainability by means of reporting effectively creates an accountability mechanism that helps organizations embed critical issues such as human rights into their business practices and at the core of their strategy. Through the means of reporting, organizations identify their sustainability risks and impacts and are encouraged to be accountable for them. Reporting contributes to internal awareness and understanding of possible negative impacts, as well as the means to mitigate them while maximizing the positives. This accessibility of information enables informed decision-making by stakeholders, including civil society, investors, customers and regulators. Consequently, businesses are more inclined to avoid or limit negative impacts and hence strive to improve performance. Ultimately, effective reporting plays an important role in a company’s success, as it responds to its stakeholders’ needs for transparency and information. This chapter presents an overview of the sustainability reporting process, draws lessons from current practices on human rights reporting, and provides recommendations for (future) practitioners, presenting a snapshot of current challenges and practical thinking.

This chapter is organized under two main sections. The first discusses how the content requirements of HRIAs are conflated with the ethical requirements of the assessment itself. This, narrow and inadequate species of HRIA ethics is quite different from the extensive body of legal ethics. The second section provides a case study of a World Bank-related impact assessment, which gives rise to legal and non-legal ethical issues and which is meant to demonstrate that the absence of concrete human rights-centred ethical guidelines in HRIAs can, even with the best of intentions, lead to outcomes that effectively violate fundamental rights.

The sixth chapter applies the analytical framework for due diligence obligations to the field of human rights protection. The individual components of due diligence obligations are analyzed with regard to the specific risks and problems of human rights law. It addresses how knowledge of human rights risks can be established, how resource constraints alter human rights obligations in times of conflict and economic recession, and what reasonable measures of protection are required. Conclusions from the previous chapter are consulted in order to decide whether due diligence concepts and methods developed in other fields of international law might be fruitfully applied to the area of human rights protection. When analyzing the application of human rights due diligence obligations though, the chapter will also reveal that the implementation of such obligations is often hampered where states lack sufficient capacities to effectively regulate and control harmful non-state conduct.

Finally, in Chapter 12, Caroline Dommen concludes our discussion by addressing how human rights impact assessments can contribute to ensuring that Indigenous rights are upheld in international trade agreements. She considers how explicit reference to the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, may improve human rights impact assessments as well as trade agreements, from both legal and policy perspectives. There is now a substantial body of impact assessments of actual or likely impacts of trade and investment agreements on human rights, including on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Her chapter describes the role and the objectives of impact assessment, explaining the particular advantages of human rights-based impact assessment. It draws on recommendations of UN human rights mechanisms and analysis of completed impact assessments of trade agreements to present some of the main principles of human rights law that are relevant in the trade policy context, and how these impose legal obligations on states to carry out human rights impact assessments prior to adopting new trade agreements.