Making the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights real: definitional principles for human rights risk identification in supply chains

Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) is one of the key elements developed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Although it has lately gained great attention, many questions remain open regarding its content and scope. The picture becomes more complex if we consider that today, businesses activity worldwide is dominated by global value chains, that is, multi-tiered structures in which thousands of small, medium and big enterprises intermingle to lead to a final product. The present article intends to make a contribution to the efforts towards a more systematic HRDD practice. It identifies the elements that help to set the performance standards for its first step: the identification of actual and potential adverse human rights impacts of the company's activity. Putting the focus on the impacts linked to the notion of business relationships, the article conducts a comparative analysis of the state of the art in HRDD. Drawing on this analysis, it then provides a draft model containing steps and questions that a company needs to ask itself in order to properly conduct a human rights risk identification.