Celebrating International Human Rights Day, we organized The Round About with the theme ‘Business and Human Rights’ on December 8th. This topic is particularly relevant due to the forthcoming EU and Dutch regulatory obligations for human rights due diligence. Rising stakeholder awareness of human rights risks among investors, customers, workers, and communities will impact firms’ access to funding, markets, talent, and license to operate. New duties for directors will raise board-level attention to considering human rights in decision-making and strategy, and to implementing appropriate human rights processes.
During the day we sketched the current landscape and presented a research on the readiness of companies to comply with the upcoming human rights due diligence legislation. Several companies shared their experiences through an interesting panel discussion. After that, all participants had a round table conversation in groups, where they discussed experiences and examples around three topics: the supply chain, own operations and grievance mechanism.
A special thanks to Margriet Rouhof (Head of Strategy, TenneT), Jennifer Greenop (Human Rights Specialist, SBM Offshore), and Kees Gootjes (Business and Human Rights Advisor, ABN AMRO) for openly sharing more about their human rights journey!