Provides an enhanced understanding of what human rights are, why they are important in a business context and how a human rights lens can offer a powerful perspective in company decision-making.
Human Rights Due Diligence Guidance
25 November 2024
ICMM’s updated Human Rights Due Diligence Guidance is an important resource that will help mining companies to better integrate human rights into existing risk management approaches.
- Every person deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. This means that all businesses, regardless of where they operate, have a responsibility to respect human rights.
- The mining industry operates in regions where human rights abuses do occur, and companies have a responsibility to act in a way that avoids infringing on the rights of others, to leverage activities to stop infringements from happening, and to address or take part in remediation if needed.
- With demand for metals and minerals critical for the energy transition set to increase dramatically, having the right human rights due diligence policies and processes in place is critical for a just and fair transition.
- Applying ongoing human rights due diligence is a way for companies to proactively assess actual and potential human rights impacts, act upon the findings, track responses, and transparently communicate how impacts have been addressed.
- While there has been significant improvement in how companies manage human rights due diligence processes, companies remain at different stages of integrating the UNGPs across their businesses.
- ICMM first published guidance on the topic in 2012 (Human Rights in the Mining and Metals Industry: Integrating Human Rights Due Diligence into Corporate Risk Management Processes) to coincide with the United Nations Human Rights Council endorsing the UNGPs, and in 2018, ICMM became the first industry body to commit to upholding the UNGPs.
- The 2023 updated Guidance responds directly to ongoing challenges faced by human rights practitioners in integrating the UNGPs across their organisations and provides an overview of leading practice and emerging regulation which is already driving performance improvements across the industry.
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Further updates have been made to the Guidance in 2024 to include three new tools that focus on the integration of human rights across different business levels and functions, how business can better understand, and address challenges related to human rights defenders and the elements of a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
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The tool on human rights defenders has been developed to support members to implement strengthened membership commitments to respect and recognise the important role of defenders, also announced in 2024. Learn more here.
- Change begins with us, but we won’t see the progress needed if we work alone. To ensure fundamental rights and freedoms are respected, we must work with governments, communities, civil society, and the financial sector if we are going to drive the change that is needed.
- The Guidance has been designed as a set of practical tools, available for anyone to download and use.
Individual tools
Tool 2 — Human Rights Due Diligence Maturity Matrix
Supporting companies to assess their current approaches to HRDD and encourage continuous learning and improvement. In so doing, they will be able to critically analyse and diagnose their HRDD systems to identify strengths and gaps, and plan and take action to improve those systems in order to move towards the next level of maturity.
Tool 3 — Assessing Salient Human Rights Issues
Sets out UNGP and ICMM requirements for assessing human rights impacts, and provides basic tools for undertaking this assessment and integrating findings into subsequent business processes.
Tool 4 — Approaches to Assessment of Human Rights Impacts
Introduce the key defining aspects of human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) and presents the different approaches to HRIAs, including characteristics, uses, strengths, and weaknesses of potential approaches.
Tool 5 — Integrating Human Rights in Business Risk Processes
Provides a clear understanding of how human rights can be better integrated into existing risk-management processes. It includes a range of approaches which can be used to help achieve this integration.
Tool 6 — Human Rights Due Diligence in Supply Chains
Highlights the key human rights issues in high-risk supply chains and provide a six-step guidance to help companies prevent, mitigate, and remediate impacts in their supply chains and business relationships. It supports companies at different levels of HRDD maturity to develop and strengthen supply chain risk management systems.
Tool 7 — Integrating Human Rights Across Business Levels and Functions
Provides companies with an understanding of how human rights responsibilities across the value chain (upstream and downstream) can be integrated across the organisational structures of a company.
Tool 8 — Respecting Human Rights Defenders
Helps guide companies to better understand and address specific challenges related to human rights defenders. It contains case studies and practical actions businesses can take to demonstrate they the systems in place to respect the rights of defenders, in line with the UNGPs.
Tool 9 — The Right to a Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment
Describes the elements of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and analyses what the implications of its recognition as a standalone right are for the mining industry. Supporting
Supporting Resources
The Guidance includes a number of resources to further support companies in their HRDD implementation journey.
