Human rights due diligence

Human rights impact assessment for a global telecoms company

We worked with a multinational telecoms company to identify the company’s salient human rights impacts.

  • Challenge

    The client wanted to systematically identify and regularly monitor its salient human rights risks across four business divisions. The client lacked internal understanding and awareness of how human rights risks may differ across the business units or across their global operations.

  • Solution

    We designed a human rights impact assessment (HRIA), drawing on our industry-leading country and industry data to systematically assess priority human rights risks in the ICT sector. We conducted additional desk-based research to evaluate key risks for each business activity.

  • Outcome

    The HRIA results identified that the key human rights risk the company was most exposed to was the potential for it to negatively impact the privacy rights of consumers in China, Vietnam and Thailand. The company subsequently conducted a review of its privacy policies and engaged in-country teams in South-East Asia to ensure staff were fully informed about the updated privacy policy.