Human Rights Impact Assessments: Trends, Challenges, And Opportunities for ICT Sector Adoption

In our previous work, we sought to place human rights impacts assessments (HRIA) within their history. We showed how the institute comes from a set of corporate practices that rest uncomfortably within different frameworks. On the one hand, HRIAs stem from the environmental impact assessments developed in the 1960s and 1970s as the legal and procedural mechanism to ensure that private companies respect minimum environmental standards defined by law and enforced by administrative agencies. On the other hand, HRIAs also operate within the obscure and ambiguous world of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Finally, we also showed how HRIAs are a preferred tool of a strange animal: the protect, respect and remedy (PRR) framework adopted by the United Nations in 2011, advanced by the UN Special Representative John Ruggie, who was actively supported by former Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.1 Thus, our conceptual analysis placed HRIAs in a specific historical context: the one produced by the UN decision to step back from mandatory international treaties addressing the relationship between corporations and human rights and to adopt Ruggie’s more relaxed framework. That initial analysis ended with the introduction of different paths through which HRIAs could evolve. From our perspective, they will either be swallowed by the self-regulation framework of CSR or will become an increasingly juridified practice, pushed by either international or national laws. The latter path, however, could look very different depending on how various regulatory possibilities are combined.2 J. Ruggie, «Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework». Human Rights Council. Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, New York. HR/PUB/11/04. 2011.